An Irishman's Diary

ON FOOT of my mentioning James Joyce’s The Dead here last week, reader Niall Walsh wrote with a question that has puzzled him for years.

Joyce was obsessed with the accuracy of his detail, Niall points out, carefully researching such incidents as when, in Ulysses, Leopold Bloom forgets his front door key to 7 Eccles Street and has to drop down over the railings to see if he can get in through the basement.

Years before, Joyce had seen his friend JF Byrne – the actual resident of the house – do just this. But by now exiled on the continent, he didn’t trust his memory of the event. So before committing it to literature, he wrote to an aunt in Dublin and asked her to get the elevation from basement to street level in Eccles Street measured for him.

This being so, my correspondent wonders how, in The Dead, Joyce could have had “13 or 14 people” sitting down to a dinner wherein the main dish was a solitary goose. And not only that, but he also implies that at least some of them were served “seconds”.

The problem, as Niall adds, is that goose, “although a rich bird”, is rather scarce in meat, compared with turkey. “Women I have spoken to say that there is no way a single goose could have fed 14 people,” he concludes, asking:  “Did the great Penman falter?”

WELL, NIALL, I too have searched the story for an explanation and am no wiser. But in a happy coincidence, I was able to study the problem up close last weekend when visiting the “House of the Dead” – the scene of the original dinner – during Dublin’s Culture Night.

In an even happier coincidence, I was among the final group admitted. Because most visitors on Culture Night only got to look at the banquet that owner Brendan Kilty had recreated, based on the text. The day’s last visitors, however, also got to eat some of the props.

The table was indeed set for 14. And as in the story it was weighed down with a “great ham”, a “round of spiced beef”, a bowl of floury potatoes, minsters of jelly, blancmange, Smyrna figs, peeled almonds, and all the rest.

There was also the prescribed pyramid of “American apples” – a typically telling Joycean detail, as Kilty explained, since American apples were a good-looking but cheap option in the Dublin of the period, thereby fitting with the Misses Morkan’s policy of maximising a tight budget.

The only thing missing from the recreated dinner, alas, was the “fat brown goose”. In fact, to use Niall Walsh’s term, there were no rich birds to be seen anywhere in the house on Friday, except possibly among the visitors.

And our host indeed apologised that the logistics of preparing a goose had defeated him (nor had there been time to peel the almonds, he conceded, a detail that the literary detectives among us had failed to notice).

So the night offered no special insights into whether a goose, however fat, would have been sufficient for the job. But for what it’s worth, when I put it to him, Kilty agreed with our correspondent that Joyce may have slipped up here.

In fact, he reminded me, the goose didn’t only have to serve the main party. It also seems to have fed the Morkan music students who, the story suggests, were catered for separately before leaving early to do whatever wild young things used to do on a Christmas night in 1904.

AS HE TOLD his own guests on Friday, Kilty earned a chance to buy the house – 15 Usher’s Island – because he had already established his credentials by buying the rubble of one of Joyce’s childhood homes, after it was demolished.

His has since spent a very large amount of money trying to restore No 15: a contributing factor (there were others) in the financial ruin that saw him petition for bankruptcy earlier this year, a subject about which he also spoke openly.

Those difficulties do not appear to have diminished his enthusiasm for the cause of Joycean bricks and mortar. He was also instrumental a few years ago in turning Sweny’s Pharmacy – where Bloom bought lemon soap – into what must now be Dublin’s smallest but, per-square-metre, most atmospheric museum.

He has dispatched bricks from the Joyce-house rubble around the world like literary messengers. And by contrast, he continues his mission to bring the world to Usher’s Island. He also has a fascinating plan to rekindle the fire in No 15’s hearth – literally – with flames from fireplaces in every Irish county.

Pending that, he was dispensing Morkan-style hospitality on Friday, with every visitor getting at least a cup of tea. Bits of the dinner were also distributed, as I say, with the exception of the aforementioned bird.

And maybe, it struck me afterwards, the banquet’s anserine deficiency was a subliminal message. Of his recent difficulties, after all, Kilty had commented: “I’m fighting back now”. So, logistics aside, it would have been perfectly understandable if he didn’t want anyone to see his goose cooked.