Books on Film: The Dead

Having recently completed a reread of James Joyce’s Dubliners, I decided to rewatch The Dead, John Huston’s film adaptation of the story of the same name. Although I have seen the film at least twice before and read Dubliners countless times, this is the first time of experiencing them in close proximity to one another. Which makes comparing them considerably easier.

The Dead is the final story in the series of fifteen that make up Dubliners. It is easily the longest of the set, running to more than fifteen thousand words, and revisits many of the same themes found in the rest of the collection. Paralysis. Jealousy. Youthful folly. Alcoholic excess. Simmering resentment. It is considered by many to be one of the greatest short stories ever written.

The 1987 film adaptation of The Dead was the last film completed by director, John Huston, before his death later that year. It is the denouement to a career that spanned forty six years, including such films as, The African Queen (1951), The Misfits (1961), Casino Royale (1967), The Man Who Would Be King (1975) and Escape to Victory (1981).

However, it is Huston’s debut feature, The Maltese Falcon (1941) that, for me, remains one of the greatest films ever made. It is a movie so engrained in my consciousness that even when I return to the novel (which I have read almost as many times as Dubliners), I visualise it in black and white, despite the rich palate of colours described by Dashiell Hammett’s prose. Sam Spade’s yellow-grey eyes shine through the greyscale like a character in a Sin City movie.

Old Yellow-Gray Eyes

The Dead is about as far removed from The Maltese Falcon as one can get. The action takes place during a Christmas party attended by the main characters, Gabriel and Greta Conroy. The party is hosted by Gabriel’s aunts, Kate and Julia Morkan. Along with their niece, Mary Jane Morkan, Gabriel refers to the women as The Three Graces.

The party actually takes place on 6 January, the Feast of Epiphany, also known as Little Christmas, or Nollaig na mBan in Gaelic, meaning Women’s Christmas, when the Christmas period was over (6 January is also Twelfth Night) and it was the turn of the women of the household to celebrate.

During Little Christmas, men would take on the duties traditionally assigned to the women in a variation on the Lord of Misrule Christmas traditions, where the masters serve the servants. It should be noted that in neither the story or the film adaptation of The Dead is there much evidence of the male characters taking on these roles, or contributing much to the preparations. They are too absorbed by their own petty concerns.

My 1st copy of Dubliners

On the surface, the story of The Dead is fairly simple. Gabriel and Greta arrive late. Gabriel is to give an after-dinner speech, as he has done at the annual gathering for a number of years. Gabriel works as a teacher and part time journalist. He fusses over the details of his speech, rejecting sections for being too high brow for the tastes of his audience.

Gabriel is teased by Miss Ivors for being a ‘West Briton’, a term of abuse used for those more interested in European rather than Irish culture. She tries to convince him to make “a trip to the west of Ireland.” He refuses. Greta tries to convince him to go, so she can return to Galway, where she grew up, but Gabriel tells her she should go on her own, or with Miss Ivors,  if she so wants.

There is dancing and music recitals. The character, Freddy Malins, shows up drunk, to the chagrin of the hostesses and his mother, who is visiting from Glasgow. Dinner is served and Gabriel gives his speech to universal acclaim.

As the Conways are preparing to leave, Gabriel finds Greta listening to the tenor singer, Bartell D'Arcy, sing ‘The Lass of Aughrim’ (a traditional Scots/ English ballad), as if lost in thought. When he asks here about it at the hotel where they are to spend the night, she tells him about Michael Furey. Furey used to sing ‘The Lass of Aughrim’ for her when she was a girl and they were courting. He died when he was only seventeen. Greta believes he died because of her, after he showed up to her house in the pouring rain on the night before she was due to leave Galway for Dublin. He refused to leave and already being sick, passed away several days later.

Greta becomes distraught as she tells Gabriel about Furey and cries herself to sleep. The story and film end with Gabriel standing by the window as he laments never having loved anyone enough to die for them. Snow is falling outside and Gabriel’s consciousness sweeps across the whole of Ireland, from the ‘dark central plain’ to ‘the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried.’ Gabriel’s inner-monologue ends the film in a voice over largely taken verbatim from the closing words of the story (with changes from the third to first person).

A simple story it might be, but the power and the glory of The Dead and Dubliners in general is often what is left unsaid. What is hinted at and alluded to between the words. It is no wonder Ernest Hemingway adored Dubliners and used the stories as touchstones for his own short fiction. If anyone could rival Joyce in leaving things unsaid, it was surely Hemingway.

However, the film loses some of the subtlety of Joyce’s prose. Which is always the trade off when adapting the written word for the screen. What this means in practice is that the film version contains a lot that is essentially padding to bulk out the story to a running time of eighty minutes (John Huston’s son, Tony, who wrote the script notes that the first draft, an almost verbatim rendering of the story, came in at about a forty five minute runtime). Some of it works and some of it does not.

Watching the film with the story fresh n my mind, the elements I find most superfluous and more than a little hammy are in the treatment of Greta. In the story, Greta is pretty much caught unawares in hearing ‘The Lass of Aughrim’ after so many years. This plummets her into the black mood that renders her mute during their journey back to the hotel. In the film, however, there are several moments where something someone says causes her to remember Furey and primes her for the moment on the stairs. 

Angelica Huston as Greta is fabulous in the role, but I find all the wistful looks a little grating as they lay it on thick for the audience. It’s not like the audience knows what’s going on, unless they are already familiar with the story. This somewhat dilutes the impact of the moment on the stairs.

Moreover, the depiction of the key scene is a bit on the nose with the way Huston is lit. In the story, Gabriel doesn’t recognise his wife for a moment, standing there in the semi-darkness. The film version leaves no-one, not even Gabriel, in any doubt as to who is on the stairs.

Where? There on the stair. Where on the stair? Right there.

The film also alters Miss Ivors reason for leaving. In the story, she leaves before dinner, but no reason is given, other than she feels she has outstayed her welcome. In the film, she is leaving to attend a union meeting, having already confessed to being an Irish nationalist.

Given the time in which the film was made and the febrile political situation in Northern Ireland at the time, as well as the financial support the IRA received from America’s Irish population, this is surely deliberate. A nod to nationalism: Of which, I think it is safe to say, Joyce would not have approved. One has only to read the Cyclops episode of Ulysses to find a clue to his opinion on such matters.

Indeed, there are these odd moments that seem to play into an idealised theme park version of Ireland found in the United States. It’s not quite leprechauns stealing me lucky charms and dying everything green, but the score can’t help but include strains of the kind of diddly-dee ‘Irish music’ you find in many tired, clichéd depictions of Irish life, from John Ford’s The Quiet Man to divers episodes of Star Trek.

The irony that Colm Meaney, who played Chief Miles O’Brien in both Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space 9, appears as Raymond Bergin is worth mentioning in passing. The familiar Star Trek trope known as, O’Brien Must Suffer, includes Meaney being made to suffer through many of those tortuously clichéd Star Trek scenes (see The Next Generation episode, Up the Long Ladder, for instance, which is painful to watch).

The Dead is the epitome of refinement by comparison. Meaney’s performance is understated. He is very much a secondary character, but no true Star Trek fan can help but follow him as he dances in circles around the room in the background. As a Joyce and a Trek fan, I am always happy when the two intersect (as with the Deep Space 9, Quark, who, like the fundamental particle, takes his name directly from Finnegans Wake).

Chief (right), what are you doing here?

Mr Grace is the one character added to film who doesn’t appear in Joyce’s story. It has been suggested he was partly included to give him some of Mr Browne’s lines and make the latter  a more overtly comic character. Browne is the only protestant character in the story, which might also have something to do with it, making him more a more scornful character to play to the predominantly Catholic Irish American audience.

Mr Grace performs one of the set piece of the film, a poem he says is called, ‘Broken Vows’ (which facilitates one of Greta’s moments of misty eyed wistfulness). Sean McClory, who played Mr Grace, coincidentally, appeared in The Quiet Man as Owen Glynn.

Another set piece comes when Aunt Julia sings a warbled voiced version of ‘Arrayed for the Bridal’, and the camera sweeps the rooms of the house, alighting on various items, from photos and needlepoint, to vases, candlesticks and porcelain angels.

I feel these are the additions that Joyce would appreciate. Music was always a part of Joyce’s life. He might have been a successful opera singer if he hadn’t chosen writing (and his terrible eyesight hadn’t precluded sight reading). His books are filled to the brim with music and the moments of recital feel as much a nod to Ulyssean episodes like Sirens as anything else. It is easy to see how much John Huston was influenced by Ulysses (his mother smuggled him a copy of the book out of France when it was still banned in the US).

The other main criticism one might make of the film adaption is that it somewhat diminishes Gabriel’s place in the story. He is still the most important character in the film, but Joyce’s story is much more focused upon him. For the most part, he is as much a point of view character as others found in Dubliners (cf. Eveline, After the Race, A Painful Case, etc.). The comic elements around Browne and Malins, as well as the set pieces, defocus Gabriel centrality to a large extent.

However, Greta is much more present in the film version. Despite the hammy elements of her various reminiscences, Angelica Huston’s portrayal makes Greta all the more sensual than the rather staid woman found in Joyce’s story. Joyce wrote better female characters later in his career, most notably Molly Bloom in Ulysses. As Joyce largely based both characters on his wife, Nora Barnacle, it is apt that Huston plays Greta closer to Molly than the actual character in The Dead.

Nora Barnacle

Joyce very much based Gabriel on himself with Gabriel’s cycling trips to the continent to brush up on his French and German. Joyce’s degree was in modern languages (French, German and Italian). He and Nora lived on the continent for all but the first few months of their relationship. Though I can’t quite imagine Joyce on a bicycle. His eyesight was too bad for that.

Donal McCann as Gabriel isn’t very Joyce like. Joyce was tall and skinny. McCann is shorter and stocky. Although both Joyce and McCann died tragically young in their 50s.Yet McCann is perfect in the role and it’s as difficult to imagine Gabriel as anyone else as it is to imagine anyone but Humphrey Bogart being Sam Spade.

It has its issues, but the film version of The Dead is still satisfying to watch. To those of us who read and reread Joyce, study him and learn at his knee and who lament his reputation as being difficult and opaque and not more widely read as a result, any cinematic representation of Joyce’s world is gratifying. It would be nice if someone would produce an anthology from the rest of Dubliners, with different directors tackling one story each. However, it seems unlikely.

So other than Joseph Strick’s 1967 version of Ulysses, which I still haven’t seen, The Dead is about the best we are going to get. Joyceans celebrate Epiphany as the first date in the Joyce calendar and some even hold a recreation of the meal and celebration featured in The Dead. I will settle for reading the story and watching the film.

Then again, I was born on 2 February, which is Candlemass, Groundhog Day, and also James Joyce’a birthday. Which is a pretty good birthday to have. And a damn good celebration.

Other Books on Film

A Scanner Darkly
Drive My Car
Dune

James Joyce, about to perform Dirty Old Town (niche humour)

 

In Praise of Penguin Books; or How to Build a Private Library

When I think of how and when I first read some of my favourite books; some of my favourite authors, more often than not those initial experiences came through a Penguin Books edition.

Reading Frankenstein in the custard yellow £1 Popular Classics edition. Reading The Raven and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in 60 pence Penguin mini booklets. The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, bought as a student from a second hand bookshop for £10 of precious food money; the orange spines of the four mouldering volumes bound together in a crisscross of elasticated rubber.

I have an aversion to all kinds of marketing and brand loyalty and yet Penguin Books have probably had a greater influence on my development as an adult than any other corporate entity.

I wasn’t much of a reader as a child. I had phases and obsessions like everyone else, but it never seemed to last very long. I was twenty eight before I even finished The Lord of the Rings, having read The Hobbit at the age of eleven, which was to all intents and purposes the first real book I ever read. An edition borrowed from a neighbouring child, shocked I hadn’t read it. I want to say it was a Penguin or Puffin edition, but I don’t think it was. I don’t really remember.

Partly because of the Hobbit, partly because of that childhood friend, my first real obsession was Choose Your Own Adventure books, especially the Fighting Fantasy series. During the time that I read them, those books were published by Puffin, the children’s wing of Penguin. I collected the first two dozen FF books in the series, as well as the guides and special editions, all of them displayed in a glass fronted bookcase in the same way that adults display commemorative plates. I still have my original copy of House of Hell, having still not completed it after nearly forty years of trying. I was never very good at computer games either.

Into my late teens and early twenties, I read fewer Penguin editions than any time before or since. For a time I was obsessed with horror novelists, reading Pan edition James Herbert novels bought from local market stalls, before progressing to the superior Clive Barker books bought new. The James Herbert novels are since consigned to charity shops. The Barker novels, however, are still an important part of my collection. My Harper Collins paperbacks are in serious state of disrepair. The opening pages in some cases are held together by sellotape, I have read and reread them so many times over the years. Yet they retain a prominent place on my bookshelves.

Having read little as a child, I stared to read more and more as I progressed into adulthood. Moreover, I began to collect (some might say hoard) books. Those custard yellow classics become an important and cheap source of reading material. As well as Frankenstein, I read Edgar Allen Poe, Gulliver’s Travels and Mrs Dalloway in similar volumes. Penguin published a parallel series of poetry books in power blue covers. Through those editions I first read Keats and Blake, as well as the war poets and the romantics.

One December, home from university, I presented my mother with a list of seven or eight Charles Dickens novels I wanted as Christmas presents, expecting her to choose two or three from the list. I received the lot, made up of the custard yellow editions. Not bad for a total outlay of less than I had recently spent on the collected Orwell. Those books stayed with me for years, until they were replaced by my great uncle’s centenary edition of Dickens’s complete works, passed on by relatives who knew I would take care of them.

At university, I developed a true collecting obsession borne out of sentimentality and gratitude. Penguin Modern Classics book were at the time printed with mint green covers. In those editions, I first read all of Orwell’s novels, as well as his trilogy of socialist non-fiction: Down and Out in Paris and London, The Road to Wigan Pier, and Homage to Catalonia. I bought my first copy of Ulysses from a second hand bookshop in Cardiff on the way home from lectures and my first copy of Finnegans Wake brand new from the local Waterstones, both in those mint green editions. I ate up Ulysses in no time, but it would be more than a decade before I finished Finnegans Wake (which still makes it an easier read than House of Hell). 

In those same mint covers, I read Kafka’s The Trail, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and The Crucible, and three of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe novels in one volume. Penguin replaced the mint green editions more than twenty years ago, but I still rescue copies from secondhand bookshops, even if I don’t know the book or the author. As such, I have read Collette’s Collected Stories, the Letters and Journals of Katherine Mansfield, and Tadeusz Borowski’s darkly comic holocaust stories, This Way for the Gas Ladies and Gentlemen, when each might have been missed in favour of books and authors more well known to me. Even now, a collection of DH Lawrence’s short stories in mint green sits on one of my many To Read piles.

The silver editions that replaced the mint green Penguin Modern Classics seem less romantic, but it is less to do with aesthetics as it is personal history and the rosy tinted view with which we regard first experiences. Like first love or the particular incarnation by which we are introduced to a film franchise, how we experience anything for the first time leaves a indelible imprint on the imagination. The First Love Fallacy.

The mint green editions hold a special place in my heart and yet it was in the silver editions that I first read East of Eden, which remains my favourite Steinbeck novel (and one of my favourite novels of all time). I own most of Steinbeck’s fiction and non-fiction and the books that aren’t in old Pan or Grafton editions are all silver Penguins. See also, the second volume of Philip Marlowe novels. Allen Ginsberg’s Deliberate Prowse. Philip K Dick’s, The Man in the High Castle.

Over the years, I’ve also picked up older Penguin Classics and Modern Penguin Classics from secondhand bookshops across the country. Before mint green, the modern classic novels were grey and white with the only colour coming from the cubist and modernist cover artwork. These were my introduction to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, the second and third volumes of Sartre’s Road to Freedom the trilogy (the first part, The Age of Reason, sits among the mint greens), and Brave New World.

While collecting secondhand books, I began a trend that started out as an accident but has become something of a superstitious habit. One of my favourite authors is Fyodor Dostoyevsky. I own copies of most of his novels, shorter and non-fiction, but I do not own any two books that are published by the same publisher and in the same edition.

Like the modern classics, the regular Penguin classics have changed over the years, so that I have a copy of Notes from the Underground and The Double printed together in a black Penguin Classics edition; a copy of The House of the Dead in the previous black and yellow covers; and several other books in earlier editions.

My copies of The Brothers Karamazov and Demons are published by Oxford University Press, but in subtly different editions. My version of the Idiot is printed by Wordsworth. I also have various other novels and short story collections in paperback and hardback from a hodge podge of publishers. It has become something I take far too seriously. That I cannot obtain a new Dostoyevsky book unless it is from a publisher or in an edition I don’t already own. No reason for it. Just because.

In arranging my books, I organise by publisher first, then edition, then alphabetically from right to left (some weird quirk of being left handed). It is the Penguin editions that occupy the central bookcase in my library, with classic and modern classic box sets sitting on top. I have collected so many Penguin books, there isn’t room for them all on the shelves and they overspill to lie sideways on top of the other rows.

Other publishers are available. Yet the default for any book available from multiple publishers will always be Penguin. I once bought a copy of War and Peace in a Wordsworth edition from a charity shop. However, the text was far too small and the font and paper quality used by Wordsworth always seem to cause me problems. The Count of Monte Cristo in a similar edition took months to get through, forever delaying the reading for something with better quality print. Which is a pity, because The Count of Monte Cristo is a masterpiece.

As such, I replaced the War and Peace Wordsworth with a two volume Penguin edition from a secondhand bookshop. Then I was able to read all 1,666 pages in four days over a long weekend. More impressively, I didn’t get through even a hundred pages on one of those days. More than five hundred pages a day over the other three. A personal record.

Other than Penguin, I have constructed what I consider an impressive library over the years. Books bought brand new and from charity and secondhand bookshops. Some special editions from the likes of Folio Book that cost a lot at the time but which have only accumulated in value over the years. In a charity shop in Sunderland in 2000, I bought a copy of Wide Sargasso Sea for 25p. From what I can tell, the book is part of an early print run of the first edition and worth a couple of hundred pounds.

Such finds are rare and in the Internet Age less likely to be missed by booksellers. But everyone can build a private library for relatively little money, if you know the right places to look. In one place where I lived, there were two places within walking distance that were practically giving books away. Five books for a pound in one charity shop that was only open on certain weekends. I found so many books there I would often throw them money on the way past even when I wasn’t buying anything. There I got a massive French dictionary for 20p. Also, a Penguin classics boxset, including Wuthering Heights, Pride and Prejudice, and Robinson Crusoe that was mine for £1. It sits like a monolith on top of the Penguin bookcase.

The other place was even better (or worse). Essentially a junk shop with boxes of books of which the owner just wanted to get rid. My housemate found it and dragged me there to pan through boxes, looking for gold. I would take a backpack with me to fill up with on Pan Agatha Christie books and come away with change from a £2 coin.

When I used to visit family in Liverpool, I had a walk planned out where I could visit four or five bookshops in a one hour circuit. One of my nine copies Moby Dick (the correct number of Moby Dicks one should own) came from those foraging expeditions. Also, Jason Burke’s excellent history on Al-Qaeda.

One birthday in 2005, I took myself on a trip to Hay-on-Wye. A cold, dark February. Largely deserted. Spending two days wandering around the town’s plethora of bookshops. So many options. So many choices to make. Buying the first Foundation books. Schindler’s Ark. Chandler’s final, unfinished Philip Marlowe novel, Playback. Seeing books like Brenda Maddox’s biography of Nora Joyce that I would buy online many years later.

A strange trip. Getting the train to Hereford. Sat reading the introduction to the Cambridge Press edition of Hamlet in a café, waiting for one of the handful of buses a day that go to Hay-on-Wye. Filled to the gills on Full English Breakfasts and my ear talked off by the landlady of the bed and breakfast where I was staying. Meaning to go back some day. A day yet to come.

How many other books have I bought on similar trips? Da Vinci biography from Clos Lucé. Chomsky in Florence. A Griel Marcus book on Dylan from Greenwich Village. Not to mention the many bookshops to be found in Amsterdam.

I remember one place I stumbled upon, which consisted mainly of Dutch language books. However, there was one lone bookshelf of English language editions. One shelf was almost entirely filled with Paul Auster novels. I was distraught. I wanted them all, but only had limited space in my backpack. I had to make do with a sole copy of Leviathan.

In Amsterdam’s American Book Exchange, many an American edition can be found. American and Canadian backpackers bring them with them from across the Atlantic and swap them out for newer books from the same shop. A treasure trove of secondhand books, replete with basement repository of science fiction and horror novels. One of my favourite places to idle away an afternoon, racked with indecision and guilt for those I leave behind.

Of course, the Mecca of European bookshops is the Parisian Shakespeare and Company, opposite Notre Dame cathedral. Not the original Shakespeare and Company, but baring the same name as Sylvia Beech’s shop that stood on the rue de l’Odéon until it was closed in 1941 following the Nazi invasion of France.

From that original location, Ulysses was first published, Beech financing its printing and publication. Not only a bookshop, but a lending library, Beech’s Shakespeare and Company was a familiar haunt for many writer’s of the so-called Lost Generation. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, all borrowed books from  Beech with varying levels of diligence about returning them on time. Hemingway was apparently one of the worst.

The original location is now a boutique, but George Whitman opened the current Shakespeare and Company in 1951 and continued to run it until his death in 2011. Part of the ritual of a transaction is to receive a Shakespeare and Company stamp on the flyleaf of the book you have bought. I have a few such books, but my copy of Campbell and Robinson’s A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake takes pride of place.

As well as physical bookshops, there are many places that sell books online. Although Abe Books is unfortunately owned by Amazon billionaire, Jeff Bezos, it is undoubtedly a valuable source for finding rare books that are otherwise out of print. As a reader and amateur scholar of James Joyce, I have found many reference books via Abe Books that I couldn’t have found anywhere else. I own three glossaries of the Gaelic, German, and Scandinavian words in Finnegan Wake, each of which are former library books and which had over the decades been borrowed a total of eight times between them before being withdrawn and put up for sale. I have also been able to find cheap, well preserved copies of most of the standard academic texts on Finnegans Wake from the same site.

My father was a great reader, though our tastes are somewhat divergent. He had a large collection of books on the kings and queens of England and was an avid collector of books on Horatio Nelson. Still, I did inherit from him my first copies of the collected Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde, as well as two copies of the collected Sherlock Holmes stories.

Many of his books were given to his local model building society after he died, but a few remained. Among these was a handful of Time Life Seafarers books that had stood on the bookshelves since the late 70s. Large black hardbacks, filled with glossy pictures. I often flipped through those books as a kid, enjoying the books on pirates and Vikings the most, like any boy with a vivid imagination. At some point I set out to actually read those books. Being more than forty years old, the veracity of the text has slipped somewhat, if it was ever very accurate to begin with.

Still, they are enjoyable for what they are and I wondered how many more there were in the series other than the ten we owned. A little research revealed a total of twenty two volumes. With the help of Abe Books, I set out to complete the set. Most were bought for a few pence plus postage and packaging from places like Tallahassee Public Library. All in remarkably good condition. Books that I will probably never read again, but like collecting mint green Penguin Modern Classic editions, the endeavour was done for entirely sentimental reasons. If nothing else, they serve as ballast at the bottom of one of my myriad bookcases.

I dislike brand loyalty and yet more of the books on my shelves are Penguin than of any other publisher. I drink out of a Bonjour Trieste cup. I have a cupboard full of similar Penguin Books mugs. I have boxes of postcards displaying Penguin covers that are affixed to the exposed sides of my bookcases.

Penguin were the first company in the UK to print cheap paperback editions of the classics and make them accessible to mainstream audiences. In 1960 they dared the wrath of the UK censors by publishing Lady Chatterley’s Lover and went to court to defend the public’s right to read it.

British and international readers owe Penguin an enormous debt of gratitude, not only for printing all kinds of paperback novels, but for filling the secondhand bookshops of the world with books that are in constant state of recycling. For hoarders like me, who are not rich and yet want to read and display the books twe have read, Penguin are an invaluable resource. As such, anyone can build a private library on a budget, should they so desire. 

Read More

Le Rayon-Vert

Time-Life Seafarer Series