15 Ushers Usland James Joyce's 'The Dead'

The Dead - John Huston's movie




15 Ushers Island, derelict. Before it became the Joyce Museum
This is 15 Ushers Island, Dublin before it became the Joyce Museum.  Now a splendid building beside the Calatrava Bridge, it is visited by hundreds of Joycean fans every year.

’15 Ushers Island and Joyce’s Story ‘The Dead’

This dark gaunt house’ is how James Joyce described this building which was – and still is – at 15 Ushers Island on Dublin’s Quays.  It is also the house where  - in 1919 - my mother, Carmel Fagan, was born. 

 Here, in the early 1900’s,  Joyce set his short story ‘The Dead’ in which the Misses Morkans give a Christmas Party on the upper floors of this house.   The characters  at the celebration are a backdrop for Gabriel, a young married man who is wracked by the fear that his wife does not love him.  To the clop of horses hooves on icy streets outside, Gabriel’s mind wanders from the party to where his wife’s lover is buried. Snow is falling all around…    A wonderful story, and world wide acclaimed as such. 

On the other hand though, to my mother, brought up in church ridden  Ireland,   the very mention of James Joyce was enough to have her set her mouth in a thin line of disapproval.  She strenuously denied that Joyce (‘that oul fella’ as she called him) had anything to do with her old home.

Then John Huston, the film director, turned up and made a film  of ‘The Dead’ and to her disgust, he made his movie in 15 Ushers Island.  It was a great success and she finally had to agree that ‘there might be something in it’.  Deigning  to come to it with me, she promptly fell asleep till it was over, sniffing, as we left the cinema that ‘it didn’t look a bit like home’ and that the story was ‘a lot of Tommy Rot about nothing’.

Some years after she died, the house became  a museum to Joyce, now called  “The Joyce House”.  To launch the new venture, the owner threw a re-anactment of the Misses Morkan’s party and my daughter and I were lucky enough to be invited.

How my mother would have gasped to see the two of us, all dressed up,  sitting among Dublin’s luminaries, got up in Joycean finery, bowler hats, black lace dresses and piano shawls.  In what were once her family’s bedrooms, we were now at  huge white linen tables, blazing with candles, scoffing  hot punch, goose and spiced beef.   A tinny piano tinkling,  a plaintif baritone singing ‘The Lass of Aughrim’, glasses clinking, and the buzz of voices getting louder as cigar smoke begins .

Well, yes she might have said it was a lot of fuss about nothing,  but how I wished she could have been with us.  And she loved a glass of punch!

(Sorry about the sad photos but I'm just getting the hang of this.