Words to live by – Frank McNally on why journalists love James Joyce’s The Dead (Ulysses not so much)

The season of Ulysses devotees and long-legged theses is upon us again – it seems to get earlier every year. But in Dublin’s Smock Alley Theatre last weekend, even amid the gathering Bloom, I had to do a live reading of the most famous passage from James Joyce’s great Christmas story, The Dead.

It was for the world premiere of a collection of new songs based on Dubliners, by a duet called Hibsen.

Hibsen are Jim Murphy and Gráinne Hunt, who met at an online workshop in the plague year of 2020, when the inspired idea of the song suite – entitled “The Stern Task of Living”, a line from Two Gallants – was born.

For the live debut, they were accompanied by a fine, eight-piece band. But in their wisdom they had also asked me to provide backing vocals in the form of spoken introductions to some of the stories, including the last.

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Reading The Dead’s immortal closing words on stage is a daunting task for a mere journalist.

You’re conscious of all the great actors who have done it, especially Donal McCann in the film. And the language itself can be overwhelming if you inhale it.

Even Gráinne’s lovely voice – a cross between Dolores Keane and Natalie Merchant – seemed to falter with emotion during the subsequent song, although that doesn’t quote the text directly.

But mid-way through my reading, I was strangely reassured by one of the less poetic sentences: “Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland.”

Prosaic as that may be, it is also deeply calming.

It sustains you through the dizzying diminuendo that follows. After all, for a journalist, even if they are from a story called The Dead, these are words to live by.

Nobody can take this away from us. Despite the many troubles our profession faces, it remains a fact that, in one of the most celebrated passages of world literature, Joyce took time out to say that the newspapers were right about something.

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Then again, his most elaborate tribute to print journalism is the Aeolus episode of Ulysses, set in the offices of the Freeman’s Journal/Evening Telegraph. And that’s a rather more mixed compliment.

In Homer’s Odyssey, on which the events of Ulysses are comically based, Aeolus was a ruler of the winds who, to ensure the hero’s safe passage, packed the winds into a bag and gave them to him. Odysseus was almost home when his crew, thinking the bag contained treasure, opened it, and the winds blew them back to Aeolia.

By implication, Joyce’s all-male, wisecracking pressmen of June 16th, 1904, are windbags, whose combined effect is to blow the hero, advertising canvasser Leopold Bloom, off course.

Among the links between Dubliners and Ulysses was a real-life journalist, Fred Gallaher.

He is one of Joyce’s dual stars, first playing a lead role in the short story A Little Cloud before coming off the bench for a cameo in Ulysses too, although in both he’s called Ignatius.

Gallaher was best known as a sportswriter, but also covered the Phoenix Park murders. And he is the subject of one of the more outlandish yarns in Aeolus, when chief windbag, Telegraph editor Myles Crawford, recalls “the smartest piece of journalism ever known”.

This had supposedly transpired when, as news of the 1882 assassinations crossed the Atlantic, the New York World wired Dublin for a map of the scene. The quick-thinking Gallaher wired back that they should fetch the Freeman’s St Patrick’s Day issue from their files.

Then, using one of the ads in it as a key, he dictated the map in relation to certain letters, including the route of Skin-the-Goat Fitzharris’s decoy car, which he made a point of repeating: “F.A.B.P. Got that?”

Gallaher’s ruse has always seemed to me either (a) ingenious in a way I don’t understand or (b) preposterous.

Why would he not just tell them to get a map of Dublin and point to the big green bit in the top left corner. Or even just get them to construct a grid?

Because, as Senan Molony, who was at the Smock Alley concert, explained afterwards, this was Joyce playing games.

A veteran journalist, Molony doubles as a Joycean detective, Forensic Division, whose books include the recent “Helen of Joyce” (Printwellbooks.com): a trojan work in every sense.

Joyce loved codes, he points out. And by a simple alphabetic shift of three letters, “FABP” becomes “IDES” – “Got that?” – connecting events in Dublin with the most infamous political assassination of all. Hence also the idea that, for a breaking story in May, the New York World should be referred to a newspaper from mid-March.

Then there is Branson’s Coffee Extract, the nearest actual product to the ad mentioned in the story. Its labels carried the slogan: “Call a spade a spade”.

But instead of the word “spade”, it used pictograms. “Two spades”, points out Detective Molony: “one each for Cavendish and Burke.”