Voting will be open through next Sunday, May 12, 11:59 PM EST. You only get one vote, so don’t accidentally click on the wrong story. No pressure.

Here are the stories, presented in the order they were received. They are all under 1000 words and there is some really delightful writing in each, so I encourage you to read them all before voting:

• Hitting the Big Time – Melanie Lynn Griffin 
• A confession from a bar stool – JC 
• The Pale Ale Induced Brutal Hangover – Philip McCollum 
• Pale Ale – Baltimore Bistros and Beer 
• On the Count of Three – RememberMemories
• “Dubliners” by James Joyce – Melody Wilson

I hope you enjoy reading these as much as I did. Good luck to all!

— James Joyce on Finnegans Wake

Words in [Finnegans Wake] are always overdetermined, signifying on many levels, even many languages, simultaneously. Language is also lapsus linguae, a slip of the tongue, for words in the Wake are constantly slipping away into other words and their associations. The extreme instability of the words makes it seem that the black and white of the written page changes places, as do day and night. Thus the experience of Joyce’s novel will “bright upon us” in a traditional illumination at the same time that it will “nightle.” That is, it will slide us on an iridescent slick of words toward an an unconscious that is, as Lacan asserts, structured as a language—so “plunging [us] to our plight.” Yet this is only a movement toward, one that does not thereby annihilate the daylight world. The letter’s agency does its work neither wholly in consciousness nor in the unconscious.

— Peter Schwenger, “Writing Hypnagogia,” At the Borders of Sleep: On Liminal Literature

I love little doggies! Paris is little doggie heaven! This picture was taken on my trip last month. My aunt takes such flattering pictures of me!

My conversation with Mr. Robert Morrow was a delightful and educational experience. A good interview helps the interviewee learn something about him or herself, and his questions forced me to think about things in ways I hadn’t considered.

But only one question about sex? And even that question was in the context of the topic of writing. Just my luck to get an interviewer who also happens to be a perfect gentleman. He didn’t even try to grab my titties or pinch my ass, even when I hugged him goodbye! And I know he’s got to be a dominant . . . such self-discipline!

Actually, there was one sexually-charged interchange he did not record. When I gave him the contact sheet that contains about a dozen erotic pictures of me, I saw that he had a puzzled look on his face. I asked him about it, and after stumbling around for the right words (such a gentleman!), he said, “Well, given that you’re so . . . well-endowed . . . ” “Why aren’t there any tit shots?” I responded, completing the question. “Ah, well, yes!” I had to laugh at his discomfort, but then I explained to him that in two of the shoots, the woman taking the pictures didn’t give a crap about my tits, and in the third, there are indeed tit shots, but all of them include another model who would have to give permission for me to use them. “So, you’re a tit man!” I said in a pleasant, accusatory tone. He just smiled. “I’ll make sure that if I ever do another photo shoot, I’ll tell the photographer to do oodles of tit shots, just for you!” I think he may have blushed! Such a gentleman!

But back to the interview . . . I think I would have liked the opportunity to show a bit more of that “touch of erotica” that I advertise. After re-reading the interview, I also found that it also left several questions unanswered that I would like to address right here and now for the historical record. We’ll start with the most important questions first and work down from there. Ready?

Q: Do you shave your pubes?

A: Hell, no! I’m not out to attract pedophiles! I think the practice of the women of my generation to shave their nether parts is as disgusting and barbaric as female circumcision. I like my bush! And if I shaved it, where would I put the perfume that adds such intense delight to the oral sex experience for my partners? Not on my sensitive skin! When I was playing the field with the ladies and an encounter started moving in a sexual direction, my first question would always be, “Do you shave?” If they said yes, I said, “See ya!” I’ve heard that guys shave now, too, an equally abhorrent practice. I don’t want to screw little boys!

Q: Do you have a tattoo?

A: Yes. A recent addition to my right butt cheek. It has very personal and special meaning for me and that’s all I’ll say about it.

Q: How will your move to France affect your love life?

A: On the female side, I was fortunate enough to fall in love with an EU citizen, a Madrileña from Spain, so the plan is that she’ll join me in Paris in a couple of months, once I’m sure things are going to work out with the new job. No such luck with the male partner. We’ve had to end our relationship, which is kind of sad, but I also think he was starting to yearn for a more traditional relationship, which was never a possibility.

Q: So, with your female partner, are you the butch or the femme?

A: Do people still use those terms? We’re both femmes. We’re both bi. In sexual matters, I’m dominant, she’s submissive . . . with a kick. We’ve been together almost five years now.

Q: How did you get into S&M and dominance, in particular?

A: That’s a long story for another day. Let’s just say I’m a natural dominant who grew up in a city dominated by perverts, so it was a match made in heaven. Nature plus nurture.

Q: Are you going to sell your house in Seattle?

A: It’s not my house to sell! It’s my father’s house. This requires some explanation.

My father was a starry-eyed idealist in his youth who decided to devote his life to helping the disadvantaged and earned a Master’s Degree in Social Work. After about two years working in one of the Great Society government bureaucracies, it struck him that he wasn’t helping anyone at all. Disillusioned, he pondered his options and decided that he wanted to build things. His father had been a carpenter all his life, and my dad had worked with him on jobs while he was growing up. Eventually he learned that what he really liked doing was restoring old houses, and there are plenty of those fog-eaten dwellings in San Francisco! He then went into business as a contractor and started fixing up old Victorians. After a while he started buying houses that had fallen into neglect and fixing them up. What he didn’t do was turn them around for a quick sale, because a.) he has no financial sense and b.) it’s very hard for him to let go of his artwork. So, he has about a half-dozen rentals in San Francisco that he tends to like they were his babies: he’s the landlord from heaven. He’s also seriously into Habitat for Humanity. When I decided to take a job in Seattle, he came up with the idea to buy a fixer-upper, so he bought one that had gone to seed and we remodeled it for me to live in. Yes, we fixed it up. I used to go with him on jobs when I was a kid and I learned a good deal about home renovation! He did all the heavy work, I did the touch-ups and we both ended up happy campers. Later, I installed the suspension hooks in my bedroom all by myself! I pay rent like all of his other tenants.

Anyway, to answer the original question, he’ll hold onto the house for a couple of months in case things don’t work out with the new job. I think things will work out, but shit happens.

Q: What does your mother do?

A: What else? She’s a translator! She’s fluent in French, English, Spanish, German and Italian. She works independently, because the organization hasn’t been invented that can handle my mother.

Q: What’s your father’s ethnic background?

A: Pure Irish. San Francisco used to be full of them. That reminds me—I forgot to mention that James Joyce is one of my favorite writers. I think Ulysses is the funniest book I’ve ever read. Back to the Irish half, I think that’s where I get my green eyes and sense of humor. I have a French first name and an Irish last name, a phonetic combination that continually baffles my French colleagues.

Q: What are you going to do with all that stuff in your music room?

A: I don’t know. For some of the equipment, I need more information about the impact of using voltage converters on the quality and consistency of sound. I’m not sure how much of it I’ll be able to use anyway, since I won’t have half the living space I have in Seattle, no matter where I wind up.

Q: Mr. Morrow noticed that all of your equipment was “high-end,” and it looked like your furniture was pretty expensive, too. Are you wealthy?

A: Ha! If I was wealthy I sure as shit wouldn’t work for a living! I’d write about music and fuck all day! I spend my money very deliberately and intentionally. I spend money with the same philosophy I apply to spending my time: I don’t waste time on stupid shit and I don’t spend money on stupid shit. I spend it on sex, music, baseball and on creating a living space to support sex and music (I can’t afford my own baseball diamond). And once I move to France, I’ll be subject to double taxation, so joining the upper class is neither a possibility nor an ambition.

Q: Do you feel any pressure to get with the program and quit smoking?

A: Fuck, no! Smoking is a pleasure that I enjoy. It’s also a form of erotic titillation for me. I’m fully aware of the risks, but all pleasures have risks. I’m far more afraid of not living than of dying. I’m aware that many people don’t like it or are terrified of second-hand smoke, so I rarely smoke outside of the confines of my living quarters. Plus, if you smoke in public, there’s always some asshole who tries to prevent you from enjoying the moment. My mother taught me to “smoke in moderation, never in desperation,” so I can go days without a cigarette when it’s inconvenient to smoke (like on many business trips). Being unable to smoke when I want to is really only irritating if I’m drinking alcohol, so I try to avoid drinking if I’m in a situation where the health Nazis are in control. It doesn’t always work, but sometimes a woman needs to practice being bitchy and grumpy.

Q: Who’s going to the World Series this year?

A: Tough call, but I’m picking the Tigers and the Braves. Everyone’s in love with the Nationals, but I think their youth will catch up with them down the stretch. I’d love to see my Giants do it again, but I still can’t figure out how they managed to pull it off last year. I like the Tigers to win it all.

Q: Will you be able to make the transition to soccer?

A: No problem! I love soccer. Having said that, you have to understand that Les Bleus (the French soccer team) is horribly dysfunctional, so I view the next World Cup with some trepidation. If I wind up in Nice, I’ll have OCG Nice, the French football equivalent of the Seattle Mariners, which will also temper my enthusiasm.

Q: What will you miss most about the USA?

A: Some really lovely people. Baseball. The Seattle music scene (the musicians, not the shitty venues). Technological innovation. American washing machines. That’s about all I can think of right now, though I’m sure something will come up when I’m over there. Since I’ll be probably be going back to Seattle from time to time for meetings, I should be able to take care of any unexpected cravings.

Q: Do you think you’ll ever come back?

A: Circumstances might force me to return to the USA, but I will not come back voluntarily. I might reconsider if the Second Amendment is overturned, The Tea Party is obliterated, The Republican Party reformed, a woman’s right to control her body is a given, religion is completely separated from politics and matters of state, and if they amend The Constitution so that campaign contributions are no longer considered free speech but completely illegal and all campaigns are publicly financed with all candidates getting an equal share. Wait . . . I’m having a flashback . . .

KIRK: Spock, what are the odds?

SPOCK: One trillion seven hundred billion six hundred million to one.

By the time you read this, I will be arriving in Paris to start a new assignment and a new life. I want to say “Au revoir, à bientôt” to my American friends and family and wish them all the best in ridding the country of the fear, loathing and flat out stupidity that dominates public discourse. The posts will keep coming: Kinks on Monday!

It says something about how underwhelmed I was at that first watching that I never got around to viewing the video-ed version, and so it was dvd that I ended up with. The second viewing though turned out to be rather a surprise. Though few images from the film had imprinted themselves on my mind, almost the whole of it seemed familiar when I watched again. I’ve read the book several times, which might have helped. On the dvd cover the blurb boasts – I think that’s the appropriate word – that every word is taken from the book and in one of those light-bulb moments, almost everything that I liked and disliked about the adaptation was illuminated.

Strick has been faithful to the book, valiantly so, though he has transposed the Dublin of Joyce’s 1904 to a nineteen-postwar sort of Dublin. I wasn’t sure if it was sixties, seventies, or eighties in intent. Perhaps scrutiny of the road vehicles, if you are into that sort of thing, would clarify. It was a present that he must have tried to strip of all its contemporary resonances.

The attempt leads to some curious losses in relation to Joyce’s story. Gerty MacDowell’s underwear, for example – not a bad place to begin – is less spectacular under its short shift dress than the Edwardian glories that Joyce no doubt had in mind! And when Bloom, later, stops to get an eyeful in that shop window there’s not much to mutely crave to adore on display.

The politics of the time are changed too. The soldiers that knock Stephen to the ground on the way home from the brothel are no longer the soldiers of the British Empire. Stephen, in the book, is beaten for insulting ‘my fucking king’, which neither we nor the Irish still had, not for insulting his girl – though that lady still gets excited that they are fighting for her! Earlier in the story, Mr Daisy’s significance too has been altered by the decades of history unraveled between novel and film.

The citizen is still the citizen, but the owld dog has become a German Shepherd, which is not at all the same as the Sykesian bruiser in the novel. And Bloom carried off in the back seat of a sports car, though still comic, is not the same as being carried off by horse carriage. Poor Paddy Dignam’s funeral is still horse-drawn though, which adds a curiously nostalgic touch to it, though I can remember, I think, post-war horse drawn hearses in my English hometown.

Even the Martello Tower, imagined, and shown, a piece of actual architecture that pre-dates the novel by a century, seems out of place when inhabited by mid twentieth century characters, and Haines is more of an upper-class twit than a ponderous Anglo-Saxon in a liberated Ireland.

In fact, the modernisation of the novel works directly against the spirit of Joyce’s attempt to re-create in words a Dublin of 1904 that could be re-imagined, re-constructed even, if the original were to vanish… which of course it has. There are still Edwardian pubs around of course, with their dark wood panelling and engraved glass, but now, and when the film was made, we cannot help perceive them as anything but ‘heritage’. For Joyce they were contemporary. When he looks into Davy Byrne’s, Leopold Bloom does not go into an old fashioned pub in the novel, but he does in the film.

Back I go again to my old hobby horse of showing and telling: Joyce has told us about his Dublin, and we can picture it…. Strick has shown us a later one, which, because he has done so, we do not need to.

And on I come to my main point: The faithful adaptation – and it is faithful, for all its transposing the time of the place – shows us one version of what the original telling might have led us to imagine. That’s what adaptations do. They save us the trouble, and the challenge, and ultimately the joy, and the discovery (the self-discovery), that the telling demands of us.

There is an interesting change at the end too, where, as in the John Huston adaptation of The Dead, there can be no better way of finishing the story than by using the words in which Joyce finished it. On Howth Head, among the Rhododendrons, with the warm mush of the seed-cake in his mouth, Bloom is asked to ask, once again…..and Molly answers ‘yes’. The scene is word perfect, and well imagined – though my Molly Bloom was always more Rubenesque – but in fact it doesn’t end as the book does.

It’s well attested that Molly Bloom’s monologue was a late addition to the novel, and in purely dramatic terms the story finds a definite closure when Bloom sees Stephen safely off into the night, and re-enters his Abode of Bliss, Plumtree’s Potted Meat notwithstanding (why is it one can never write about Ulysses without pumping it up with quotes, puns and literary how-d’yee dos!), and this is true to some extent in both the novel and the film. But, whereas the novel ends entirely at Molly’s final yes, the film does not. There is a moment of reflection, during which the camera runs on, and we see her face: what is she contemplating, reflecting upon, as we watch? In the book there is no such moment. It is we who must contemplate and reflect, upon what we have been told. In the film we cannot help but watch what we are shown, and it is upon that that we must reflect. Strick, almost certainly without meaning to, has moved the ending of the book on into an untold future, albeit a momentary one; and in doing so he has moved us on, taking our focus away from Joyce’s told ‘yes’, and placing it on his shown  moment.

Shockley’s poetics is as versatile as the history she endeavors to render. While she indeed takes liberties with history, her resultant historicity seems entirely genuine. For instance, ‘from The Lost Letters of Frederick Douglas’ reads as a found poem. The language is reminiscent of Douglas’s while the tonality has both the playful father-to-daughter banter (‘Can you really be fifty-three this / month? I still look for you to peek around / my door as if you’d discovered a toy / you thought gone for good’) as well as the antithetical solemn father-to-daughter repartee: ‘You’re as wrong as you are / lucky.’ The poem is derived wholly out of Shockley’s mind, and still we can’t help but feel the authenticity. This pseudo-found poem only begins to skim the surface of her ingenuity. She implements forms ranging from mesostics to concrete poetry; take her poem ‘x marks the spot’ (shaped like an X), whose form is so adroit I can’t begin to describe it in words (hence, I believe, the physicality of the poem). In the poem, Shockley crosses her X at

affixed african
amended american

creating a nearly perfect blend of form and content. I believe that what Shockley is aiming to do, especially in poems like ‘x marks the spot’, is (re)call our attention to the word. This is often the aim of literary artists. When James Joyce—who is considered both inane and genius for his ‘stream of conscious’—was asked if he had a good day of writing, he responded that he indeed did! When asked how much he got down he answered ‘Three sentences.’ It is this attention to the word that makes a great writer. Shockley’s ‘clare’s song’ consists of words that are placed in succession only with regard to their association to one another. Although the conventions of grammar are stripped away, Shockley still conveys a story rife with emotion; her character is introduced, her story is told, and her end is envisioned. It is pure narrative driven by individual words dependent on the subjectivity of its reader; it is pointillism in verse.

Each of her poems maintain its own life and attitude because she is truly submerged in our wor(l)d, and that’s why her poetry is so consistently good. Here’s a poem on America that left me stunned when I read it and gave me chills when I had the good fortune of hearing her perform it.

dear opaque policy,

transparency is the new this
is for your own good. covering
your ears is a sound defense.
the status quo never looked
so good. goods. and servers.
ye gods! the national security
blanket is a crazy quilt. award
awash aweigh awol. a globe
warming up to consumption.
he’s got the whole world in
his lands. friends. ends. trust
me. must we? survey says:
property. and life, and liberty,
but only if you’re not it. tag.

Frail the white rose and frail are
Her hands that gave
Whose soul is sere and paler
Than time’s wan wave.

Rosefrail and fair — yet frailest
A wonder wild
In gentle eyes thou veilest,
My blueveined child.

I won’t depart too far from my wheelhouse, reviewing fine literature, but I will be applying a new technique: reviewing a book as one does a beer.

To make it even more exciting, I’ve also been sampling a fine beverage or two. (When in Rome!) I can only assume that this what my instructors mean when they encourage us to experiment with our writing.

What lucky book gets this new (brew) treatment? James Joyce’s Dubliners, of course.

According to Beer Advocate, there are five key aspects to address in a beer review: Appearance, smell, taste, mouthful, and overall.

Appearance
Dubliners comprises fifteen stories in a slim volume. I chose it because James Joyce is known as the Irish novelist, and Ulysses was too daunting. Also, I wanted to be seen reading something impressive on the metro. It’s all about appearances, after all.

The narrators grow in age as the tale progresses, which I wouldn’t have noticed if the kind guys over at Wikipedia hasn’t pointed it out. I did notice that I enjoyed the tales in the middle more, which in retrospect may have to do with self-identification.

Smell
I read an inexpensive Dover Thrift paperback edition. Books like that remind me of why I still enjoy leafing through a real book, my eBook addiction notwithstanding. Yes, I count myself among those who profess love for that print-book smell. I’m told it has to do with the slow decay of ink, which seems somehow appropriate for this collection of stories.

But I’m being too literal, even for a literary review. Joyce is a master of images, of describing the textures and contours of everyday life. You can’t help but smell that invigorating spring air that entices two schoolboys to truancy, or inhale the suffocating dust in the room of a young woman contemplating departure from her homeland. Readers are submerged in Joyce’s well-crafted, realistic environments.

Taste
According, once again, to my old friend Wikipedia, Joyce sent the manuscript out 18 different times to 15 publishers. No dice for the first decade. (You’ve got to admire the man’s persistence.) It was finally published by Grant Richards, but not before a harrowing editorial process; a previous publisher reneged on their agreement and even went so far as to have the printer burn the manuscript. Joyce somehow procured one last copy to turn into the next publisher, which thankfully had less pyromaniacal tendencies.

Why such a hubbub? Apparently some objected to his literary taste. His open exploration of relationships–including sexuality–threw some publishers for a loop. This was the UK’s 50 Shades of Gray–aside from the real 50 Shades, of course.

Mouthfeel
The book focuses on capturing the voice of the commoner, which is not so unusual now but was in Joyce’s time. He may have been searching for Irish national identity in this collection, and while it doesn’t seem like he he fully succeeds in writing a seminal Irish story here, he does break ground with his use of common speech and taboo but ubiquitous topics.

Overall
I liked most of the stories, but I’m not drunk on them. (See what I did there?) The story I liked best was, unsurprisingly, the best-known in the collection, “The Dead.”

I recommend this flight of fifteen stories to Joyce fans and those interested in learning more about twentieth-century Ireland; otherwise, readers might want to brave Ulysses after all.

Yearning for my usual ranking system? Oh, all right. I spoil you.

Title: Dubliners
Author: James Joyce
ISBN: 0486268705
Pages: 152
Release date: 1914 (originally); May 1, 1991 (Dover)
Publisher: Dover Publications
Genre: Fiction (short stories)
Format: Paperback
Source: Personal collection
Rating: 3.5 out of 5

James Joyce
Irlanda, 1882 – 1941

“Majestuoso, el orondo Buck Mulligan llegó por el hueco de la escalera, portando un cuenco lleno de espuma sobre el que un espejo y una navaja de afeitar se cruzaban. Un batín amarillo, desatado, se ondulaba delicadamente a su espalda en el aire apacible de la mañana. Elevó el cuenco y entonó:
-Introibo ad altare Dei.
Se detuvo, escudriñó la escalera oscura, sinuosa y llamó rudamente:
-¡Sube, Kinch! ¡Sube, desgraciado jesuita!
Solemnemente dio unos pasos al frente y se montó sobre la explanada redonda. Dio media vuelta y bendijo gravemente tres veces la torre, la tierra circundante y las montañas que amanecían. Luego, al darse cuenta de Stephen Dedalus, se inclinó hacia él y trazó rápidas cruces en el aire, barbotando y agitando la cabeza. Stephen Dedalus, molesto y adormilado, apoyó los brazos en el remate de la escalera y miró fríamente la cara agitada barbotante que lo bendecía, equina en extensión, y el pelo claro intonso, veteado y tintado como roble pálido.
Buck Mulligan espió un instante debajo del espejo y luego cubrió el cuenco esmeradamente.
-¡Al cuartel! dijo severamente.
Añadió con tono de predicador:
-Porque esto, Oh amadísimos, es la verdadera cristina: cuerpo y alma y sangre y clavos de Cristo. Música
lenta, por favor. Cierren los ojos, caballeros. Un momento. Un pequeño contratiempo con los corpúsculos blancos. Silencio, todos.
Escudriñó de soslayo las alturas y dio un largo, lento silbido de atención, luego quedó absorto unos momentos, los blancos dientes parejos resplandeciendo con centelleos de oro. Cnsóstomo. Dos fuertes silbidos penetrantes contestaron en la calma.
-Gracias, amigo, exclamó animadamente. Con esto es suficiente. Corta la corriente ¿quieres?
Saltó de la explanada y miró gravemente a su avizorador, recogiéndose alrededor de las piernas los pliegues sueltos del batín. La cara oronda sombreada y la adusta mandíbula ovalada recordaban a un prelado protector de las artes en la edad media. Una sonrisa placentera despuntó quedamente en sus labios.
-¡Menuda farsa! dijo alborozadamente. ¡Tu absurdo nombre, griego antiguo!
Señaló con el dedo en chanza amistosa y se dirigió al parapeto, riéndose para sí. Stephen Dedalus subió, le siguió desganadamente unos pasos y se sentó en el borde de la explanada, fijándose cómo reclinaba el espejo contra el parapeto, mojaba la brocha en el cuenco y se enjabonaba los cachetes y el cuello.
La voz alborozada de Buck Mulligan prosiguió:
-Mi nombre es absurdo también: Malachi Mulligan, dos dáctilos. Pero suena helénico ¿no? Ágil y fogoso
como el mismísimo buco. Tenemos que ir a Atenas. ¿Vendrás si consigo que la tía suelte veinte libras?”

GRACIAS POR LEER Y COMPARTIR MY BLOG: http://www.florentinoletters.com

A view of a limited edition James Joyce collector coin issued by the Central Bank.

Stephen James Joyce, grandson of James Joyce, has condemned the commemorative coin for the author issued this week by the Central Bank.

The coin, which sold out yesterday, two days after 10,000 were issued, contains an error in the quotation used from the third episode of Ulysses .

Mr Joyce described the circumstances of the coin’s issuing as “one of the greatest insults to the Joyce family that has ever been perpetrated in Ireland”.

Lack of consultation
Mr Joyce complained about a lack of consultation with him and the James Joyce estate by the Central Bank over the coin.

He said the first he heard of it was in a communication last September, but when he attempted to contact the person concerned it turned out he was no longer at the bank. Another brief communication arrived in March, which contained no further information. Had he seen the coin, or an image of it, the error would have been spotted.

Click here to read the rest of this story

TWO GENTLEMEN who were in the lavatory at the time tried to lift him up: but he was quite helpless. He lay curled up at the foot of the stairs down which he had fallen. They succeeded in turning him over. His hat had rolled a few yards away and his clothes were smeared with the filth and ooze of the floor on which he had lain, face downwards. His eyes were closed and he breathed with a grunting noise. A thin stream of blood trickled from the corner of his mouth.

These two gentlemen and one of the curates carried him up the stairs and laid him down again on the floor of the bar. In two minutes he was surrounded by a ring of men. The manager of the bar asked everyone who he was and who was with him. No one knew who he was but one of the curates said he had served the gentleman with a small rum.

“Was he by himself?” asked the manager.

“No, sir. There was two gentlemen with him.”

“And where are they?”

No one knew; a voice said:

“Give him air. He’s fainted.”

The ring of onlookers distended and closed again elastically. A dark medal of blood had formed itself near the man’s head on the tessellated floor. The manager, alarmed by the grey pallor of the man’s face, sent for a policeman.

His collar was unfastened and his necktie undone. He opened eyes for an instant, sighed and closed them again. One of gentlemen who had carried him upstairs held a dinged silk hat in his hand. The manager asked repeatedly did no one know who the injured man was or where had his friends gone. The door of the bar opened and an immense constable entered. A crowd which had followed him down the laneway collected outside the door, struggling to look in through the glass panels.

The manager at once began to narrate what he knew. The constable, a young man with thick immobile features, listened. He moved his head slowly to right and left and from the manager to the person on the floor, as if he feared to be the victim of some delusion. Then he drew off his glove, produced a small book from his waist, licked the lead of his pencil and made ready to indite. He asked in a suspicious provincial accent:

“Who is the man? What’s his name and address?”

A young man in a cycling-suit cleared his way through the ring of bystanders. He knelt down promptly beside the injured man and called for water. The constable knelt down also to help. The young man washed the blood from the injured man’s mouth and then called for some brandy. The constable repeated the order in an authoritative voice until a curate came running with the glass. The brandy was forced down the man’s throat. In a few seconds he opened his eyes and looked about him. He looked at the circle of faces and then, understanding, strove to rise to his feet.

“You’re all right now?” asked the young man in the cycling-suit.

“Sha,’s nothing,” said the injured man, trying to stand up.

He was helped to his feet. The manager said something about a hospital and some of the bystanders gave advice. The battered silk hat was placed on the man’s head. The constable asked:

“Where do you live?”

The man, without answering, began to twirl the ends of his moustache. He made light of his accident. It was nothing, he said: only a little accident. He spoke very thickly.

“Where do you live?” repeated the constable.

The man said they were to get a cab for him. While the point was being debated a tall agile gentleman of fair complexion, wearing a long yellow ulster, came from the far end of the bar. Seeing the spectacle, he called out:

“Hallo, Tom, old man! What’s the trouble?”

“Sha,’s nothing,” said the man.

The new-comer surveyed the deplorable figure before him and then turned to the constable, saying:

“It’s all right, constable. I’ll see him home.”

The constable touched his helmet and answered:

“All right, Mr. Power!”

“Come now, Tom,” said Mr. Power, taking his friend by the arm. “No bones broken. What? Can you walk?”

The young man in the cycling-suit took the man by the other arm and the crowd divided.

“How did you get yourself into this mess?” asked Mr. Power.

“The gentleman fell down the stairs,” said the young man.

“I’ ‘ery ‘uch o’liged to you, sir,” said the injured man.

“Not at all.”

“‘ant we have a little…?”

“Not now. Not now.”

The three men left the bar and the crowd sifted through the doors in to the laneway. The manager brought the constable to the stairs to inspect the scene of the accident. They agreed that the gentleman must have missed his footing. The customers returned to the counter and a curate set about removing the traces of blood from the floor.

When they came out into Grafton Street, Mr. Power whistled for an outsider. The injured man said again as well as he could.

“I’ ‘ery ‘uch o’liged to you, sir. I hope we’ll ‘eet again. ‘y na’e is Kernan.”

The shock and the incipient pain had partly sobered him.

“Don’t mention it,” said the young man.

They shook hands. Mr. Kernan was hoisted on to the car and, while Mr. Power was giving directions to the carman, he expressed his gratitude to the young man and regretted that they could not have a little drink together.

“Another time,” said the young man.

The car drove off towards Westmoreland Street. As it passed Ballast Office the clock showed half-past nine. A keen east wind hit them, blowing from the mouth of the river. Mr. Kernan was huddled together with cold. His friend asked him to tell how the accident had happened.

“I’an’t ‘an,” he answered, “‘y ‘ongue is hurt.”

“Show.”

The other leaned over the well of the car and peered into Mr. Kernan’s mouth but he could not see. He struck a match and, sheltering it in the shell of his hands, peered again into the mouth which Mr. Kernan opened obediently. The swaying movement of the car brought the match to and from the opened mouth. The lower teeth and gums were covered with clotted blood and a minute piece of the tongue seemed to have been bitten off. The match was blown out.

“That’s ugly,” said Mr. Power.

“Sha, ‘s nothing,” said Mr. Kernan, closing his mouth and pulling the collar of his filthy coat across his neck.

Mr. Kernan was a commercial traveller of the old school which believed in the dignity of its calling. He had never been seen in the city without a silk hat of some decency and a pair of gaiters. By grace of these two articles of clothing, he said, a man could always pass muster. He carried on the tradition of his Napoleon, the great Blackwhite, whose memory he evoked at times by legend and mimicry. Modern business methods had spared him only so far as to allow him a little office in Crowe Street, on the window blind of which was written the name of his firm with the address—London, E. C. On the mantelpiece of this little office a little leaden battalion of canisters was drawn up and on the table before the window stood four or five china bowls which were usually half full of a black liquid. From these bowls Mr. Kernan tasted tea. He took a mouthful, drew it up, saturated his palate with it and then spat it forth into the grate. Then he paused to judge.

Mr. Power, a much younger man, was employed in the Royal Irish Constabulary Office in Dublin Castle. The arc of his social rise intersected the arc of his friend’s decline, but Mr. Kernan’s decline was mitigated by the fact that certain of those friends who had known him at his highest point of success still esteemed him as a character. Mr. Power was one of these friends. His inexplicable debts were a byword in his circle; he was a debonair young man.

The car halted before a small house on the Glasnevin road and Mr. Kernan was helped into the house. His wife put him to bed while Mr. Power sat downstairs in the kitchen asking the children where they went to school and what book they were in. The children—two girls and a boy, conscious of their father’s helplessness and of their mother’s absence, began some horseplay with him. He was surprised at their manners and at their accents, and his brow grew thoughtful. After a while Mrs. Kernan entered the kitchen, exclaiming:

“Such a sight! O, he’ll do for himself one day and that’s the holy alls of it. He’s been drinking since Friday.”

Mr. Power was careful to explain to her that he was not responsible, that he had come on the scene by the merest accident. Mrs. Kernan, remembering Mr. Power’s good offices during domestic quarrels, as well as many small, but opportune loans, said:

“O, you needn’t tell me that, Mr. Power. I know you’re a friend of his, not like some of the others he does be with. They’re all right so long as he has money in his pocket to keep him out from his wife and family. Nice friends! Who was he with tonight, I’d like to know?”

Mr. Power shook his head but said nothing.

“I’m so sorry,” she continued, “that I’ve nothing in the house to offer you. But if you wait a minute I’ll send round to Fogarty’s at the corner.”

Mr. Power stood up.

“We were waiting for him to come home with the money. He never seems to think he has a home at all.”

“O, now, Mrs. Kernan,” said Mr. Power, “we’ll make him turn over a new leaf. I’ll talk to Martin. He’s the man. We’ll come here one of these nights and talk it over.”

She saw him to the door. The carman was stamping up and down the footpath, and swinging his arms to warm himself.

“It’s very kind of you to bring him home,” she said.

“Not at all,” said Mr. Power.

He got up on the car. As it drove off he raised his hat to her gaily.

“We’ll make a new man of him,” he said. “Good-night, Mrs. Kernan.”

Mrs. Kernan’s puzzled eyes watched the car till it was out of sight. Then she withdrew them, went into the house and emptied her husband’s pockets.

She was an active, practical woman of middle age. Not long before she had celebrated her silver wedding and renewed her intimacy with her husband by waltzing with him to Mr. Power’s accompaniment. In her days of courtship, Mr. Kernan had seemed to her a not ungallant figure: and she still hurried to the chapel door whenever a wedding was reported and, seeing the bridal pair, recalled with vivid pleasure how she had passed out of the Star of the Sea Church in Sandymount, leaning on the arm of a jovial well-fed man, who was dressed smartly in a frock-coat and lavender trousers and carried a silk hat gracefully balanced upon his other arm. After three weeks she had found a wife’s life irksome and, later on, when she was beginning to find it unbearable, she had become a mother. The part of mother presented to her no insuperable difficulties and for twenty-five years she had kept house shrewdly for her husband. Her two eldest sons were launched. One was in a draper’s shop in Glasgow and the other was clerk to a tea-merchant in Belfast. They were good sons, wrote regularly and sometimes sent home money. The other children were still at school.

Mr. Kernan sent a letter to his office next day and remained in bed. She made beef-tea for him and scolded him roundly. She accepted his frequent intemperance as part of the climate, healed him dutifully whenever he was sick and always tried to make him eat a breakfast. There were worse husbands. He had never been violent since the boys had grown up, and she knew that he would walk to the end of Thomas Street and back again to book even a small order.

Two nights after, his friends came to see him. She brought them up to his bedroom, the air of which was impregnated with a personal odour, and gave them chairs at the fire. Mr. Kernan’s tongue, the occasional stinging pain of which had made him somewhat irritable during the day, became more polite. He sat propped up in the bed by pillows and the little colour in his puffy cheeks made them resemble warm cinders. He apologised to his guests for the disorder of the room, but at the same time looked at them a little proudly, with a veteran’s pride.

He was quite unconscious that he was the victim of a plot which his friends, Mr. Cunningham, Mr. M’Coy and Mr. Power had disclosed to Mrs. Kernan in the parlour. The idea had been Mr. Power’s, but its development was entrusted to Mr. Cunningham. Mr. Kernan came of Protestant stock and, though he had been converted to the Catholic faith at the time of his marriage, he had not been in the pale of the Church for twenty years. He was fond, moreover, of giving side-thrusts at Catholicism.

Mr. Cunningham was the very man for such a case. He was an elder colleague of Mr. Power. His own domestic life was not very happy. People had great sympathy with him, for it was known that he had married an unpresentable woman who was an incurable drunkard. He had set up house for her six times; and each time she had pawned the furniture on him.

Everyone had respect for poor Martin Cunningham. He was a thoroughly sensible man, influential and intelligent. His blade of human knowledge, natural astuteness particularised by long association with cases in the police courts, had been tempered by brief immersions in the waters of general philosophy. He was well informed. His friends bowed to his opinions and considered that his face was like Shakespeare’s.

When the plot had been disclosed to her, Mrs. Kernan had said:

“I leave it all in your hands, Mr. Cunningham.”

After a quarter of a century of married life, she had very few illusions left. Religion for her was a habit, and she suspected that a man of her husband’s age would not change greatly before death. She was tempted to see a curious appropriateness in his accident and, but that she did not wish to seem bloody-minded, would have told the gentlemen that Mr. Kernan’s tongue would not suffer by being shortened. However, Mr. Cunningham was a capable man; and religion was religion. The scheme might do good and, at least, it could do no harm. Her beliefs were not extravagant. She believed steadily in the Sacred Heart as the most generally useful of all Catholic devotions and approved of the sacraments. Her faith was bounded by her kitchen, but, if she was put to it, she could believe also in the banshee and in the Holy Ghost.

The gentlemen began to talk of the accident. Mr. Cunningham said that he had once known a similar case. A man of seventy had bitten off a piece of his tongue during an epileptic fit and the tongue had filled in again, so that no one could see a trace of the bite.

“Well, I’m not seventy,” said the invalid.

“God forbid,” said Mr. Cunningham.

“It doesn’t pain you now?” asked Mr. M’Coy.

Mr. M’Coy had been at one time a tenor of some reputation. His wife, who had been a soprano, still taught young children to play the piano at low terms. His line of life had not been the shortest distance between two points and for short periods he had been driven to live by his wits. He had been a clerk in the Midland Railway, a canvasser for advertisements for The Irish Times and for The Freeman’s Journal, a town traveller for a coal firm on commission, a private inquiry agent, a clerk in the office of the Sub-Sheriff, and he had recently become secretary to the City Coroner. His new office made him professionally interested in Mr. Kernan’s case.

“Pain? Not much,” answered Mr. Kernan. “But it’s so sickening. I feel as if I wanted to retch off.”

“That’s the boose,” said Mr. Cunningham firmly.

“No,” said Mr. Kernan. “I think I caught a cold on the car. There’s something keeps coming into my throat, phlegm or——”

“Mucus.” said Mr. M’Coy.

“It keeps coming like from down in my throat; sickening.”

“Yes, yes,” said Mr. M’Coy, “that’s the thorax.”

He looked at Mr. Cunningham and Mr. Power at the same time with an air of challenge. Mr. Cunningham nodded his head rapidly and Mr. Power said:

“Ah, well, all’s well that ends well.”

“I’m very much obliged to you, old man,” said the invalid.

Mr. Power waved his hand.

“Those other two fellows I was with——”

“Who were you with?” asked Mr. Cunningham.

“A chap. I don’t know his name. Damn it now, what’s his name? Little chap with sandy hair….”

“And who else?”

“Harford.”

“Hm,” said Mr. Cunningham.

When Mr. Cunningham made that remark, people were silent. It was known that the speaker had secret sources of information. In this case the monosyllable had a moral intention. Mr. Harford sometimes formed one of a little detachment which left the city shortly after noon on Sunday with the purpose of arriving as soon as possible at some public-house on the outskirts of the city where its members duly qualified themselves as bona fide travellers. But his fellow-travellers had never consented to overlook his origin. He had begun life as an obscure financier by lending small sums of money to workmen at usurious interest. Later on he had become the partner of a very fat, short gentleman, Mr. Goldberg, in the Liffey Loan Bank. Though he had never embraced more than the Jewish ethical code, his fellow-Catholics, whenever they had smarted in person or by proxy under his exactions, spoke of him bitterly as an Irish Jew and an illiterate, and saw divine disapproval of usury made manifest through the person of his idiot son. At other times they remembered his good points.

“I wonder where did he go to,” said Mr. Kernan.

He wished the details of the incident to remain vague. He wished his friends to think there had been some mistake, that Mr. Harford and he had missed each other. His friends, who knew quite well Mr. Harford’s manners in drinking were silent. Mr. Power said again:

“All’s well that ends well.”

Mr. Kernan changed the subject at once.

“That was a decent young chap, that medical fellow,” he said. “Only for him——”

“O, only for him,” said Mr. Power, “it might have been a case of seven days, without the option of a fine.”

“Yes, yes,” said Mr. Kernan, trying to remember. “I remember now there was a policeman. Decent young fellow, he seemed. How did it happen at all?”

“It happened that you were peloothered, Tom,” said Mr. Cunningham gravely.

“True bill,” said Mr. Kernan, equally gravely.

“I suppose you squared the constable, Jack,” said Mr. M’Coy.

Mr. Power did not relish the use of his Christian name. He was not straight-laced, but he could not forget that Mr. M’Coy had recently made a crusade in search of valises and portmanteaus to enable Mrs. M’Coy to fulfil imaginary engagements in the country. More than he resented the fact that he had been victimised he resented such low playing of the game. He answered the question, therefore, as if Mr. Kernan had asked it.

The narrative made Mr. Kernan indignant. He was keenly conscious of his citizenship, wished to live with his city on terms mutually honourable and resented any affront put upon him by those whom he called country bumpkins.

“Is this what we pay rates for?” he asked. “To feed and clothe these ignorant bostooms… and they’re nothing else.”

Mr. Cunningham laughed. He was a Castle official only during office hours.

“How could they be anything else, Tom?” he said.

He assumed a thick, provincial accent and said in a tone of command:

“65, catch your cabbage!”

Everyone laughed. Mr. M’Coy, who wanted to enter the conversation by any door, pretended that he had never heard the story. Mr. Cunningham said:

“It is supposed—they say, you know—to take place in the depot where they get these thundering big country fellows, omadhauns, you know, to drill. The sergeant makes them stand in a row against the wall and hold up their plates.”

He illustrated the story by grotesque gestures.

“At dinner, you know. Then he has a bloody big bowl of cabbage before him on the table and a bloody big spoon like a shovel. He takes up a wad of cabbage on the spoon and pegs it across the room and the poor devils have to try and catch it on their plates: 65, catch your cabbage.”

Everyone laughed again: but Mr. Kernan was somewhat indignant still. He talked of writing a letter to the papers.

“These yahoos coming up here,” he said, “think they can boss the people. I needn’t tell you, Martin, what kind of men they are.”

Mr. Cunningham gave a qualified assent.

“It’s like everything else in this world,” he said. “You get some bad ones and you get some good ones.”

“O yes, you get some good ones, I admit,” said Mr. Kernan, satisfied.

“It’s better to have nothing to say to them,” said Mr. M’Coy. “That’s my opinion!”

Mrs. Kernan entered the room and, placing a tray on the table, said:

“Help yourselves, gentlemen.”

Mr. Power stood up to officiate, offering her his chair. She declined it, saying she was ironing downstairs, and, after having exchanged a nod with Mr. Cunningham behind Mr. Power’s back, prepared to leave the room. Her husband called out to her:

“And have you nothing for me, duckie?”

“O, you! The back of my hand to you!” said Mrs. Kernan tartly.

Her husband called after her:

“Nothing for poor little hubby!”

He assumed such a comical face and voice that the distribution of the bottles of stout took place amid general merriment.

The gentlemen drank from their glasses, set the glasses again on the table and paused. Then Mr. Cunningham turned towards Mr. Power and said casually:

“On Thursday night, you said, Jack.”

“Thursday, yes,” said Mr. Power.

“Righto!” said Mr. Cunningham promptly.

“We can meet in M’Auley’s,” said Mr. M’Coy. “That’ll be the most convenient place.”

“But we mustn’t be late,” said Mr. Power earnestly, “because it is sure to be crammed to the doors.”

“We can meet at half-seven,” said Mr. M’Coy.

“Righto!” said Mr. Cunningham.

“Half-seven at M’Auley’s be it!”

There was a short silence. Mr. Kernan waited to see whether he would be taken into his friends’ confidence. Then he asked:

“What’s in the wind?”

“O, it’s nothing,” said Mr. Cunningham. “It’s only a little matter that we’re arranging about for Thursday.”

“The opera, is it?” said Mr. Kernan.

“No, no,” said Mr. Cunningham in an evasive tone, “it’s just a little… spiritual matter.”

“O,” said Mr. Kernan.

There was silence again. Then Mr. Power said, point blank:

“To tell you the truth, Tom, we’re going to make a retreat.”

“Yes, that’s it,” said Mr. Cunningham, “Jack and I and M’Coy here—we’re all going to wash the pot.”

He uttered the metaphor with a certain homely energy and, encouraged by his own voice, proceeded:

“You see, we may as well all admit we’re a nice collection of scoundrels, one and all. I say, one and all,” he added with gruff charity and turning to Mr. Power. “Own up now!”

“I own up,” said Mr. Power.

“And I own up,” said Mr. M’Coy.

“So we’re going to wash the pot together,” said Mr. Cunningham.

A thought seemed to strike him. He turned suddenly to the invalid and said:

“D’ye know what, Tom, has just occurred to me? You night join in and we’d have a four-handed reel.”

“Good idea,” said Mr. Power. “The four of us together.”

Mr. Kernan was silent. The proposal conveyed very little meaning to his mind, but, understanding that some spiritual agencies were about to concern themselves on his behalf, he thought he owed it to his dignity to show a stiff neck. He took no part in the conversation for a long while, but listened, with an air of calm enmity, while his friends discussed the Jesuits.

“I haven’t such a bad opinion of the Jesuits,” he said, intervening at length. “They’re an educated order. I believe they mean well, too.”

“They’re the grandest order in the Church, Tom,” said Mr. Cunningham, with enthusiasm. “The General of the Jesuits stands next to the Pope.”

“There’s no mistake about it,” said Mr. M’Coy, “if you want a thing well done and no flies about, you go to a Jesuit. They’re the boyos have influence. I’ll tell you a case in point….”

“The Jesuits are a fine body of men,” said Mr. Power.

“It’s a curious thing,” said Mr. Cunningham, “about the Jesuit Order. Every other order of the Church had to be reformed at some time or other but the Jesuit Order was never once reformed. It never fell away.”

“Is that so?” asked Mr. M’Coy.

“That’s a fact,” said Mr. Cunningham. “That’s history.”

“Look at their church, too,” said Mr. Power. “Look at the congregation they have.”

“The Jesuits cater for the upper classes,” said Mr. M’Coy.

“Of course,” said Mr. Power.

“Yes,” said Mr. Kernan. “That’s why I have a feeling for them. It’s some of those secular priests, ignorant, bumptious——”

“They’re all good men,” said Mr. Cunningham, “each in his own way. The Irish priesthood is honoured all the world over.”

“O yes,” said Mr. Power.

“Not like some of the other priesthoods on the continent,” said Mr. M’Coy, “unworthy of the name.”

“Perhaps you’re right,” said Mr. Kernan, relenting.

“Of course I’m right,” said Mr. Cunningham. “I haven’t been in the world all this time and seen most sides of it without being a judge of character.”

The gentlemen drank again, one following another’s example. Mr. Kernan seemed to be weighing something in his mind. He was impressed. He had a high opinion of Mr. Cunningham as a judge of character and as a reader of faces. He asked for particulars.

“O, it’s just a retreat, you know,” said Mr. Cunningham. “Father Purdon is giving it. It’s for business men, you know.”

“He won’t be too hard on us, Tom,” said Mr. Power persuasively.

“Father Purdon? Father Purdon?” said the invalid.

“O, you must know him, Tom,” said Mr. Cunningham stoutly. “Fine, jolly fellow! He’s a man of the world like ourselves.”

“Ah,… yes. I think I know him. Rather red face; tall.”

“That’s the man.”

“And tell me, Martin…. Is he a good preacher?”

“Munno…. It’s not exactly a sermon, you know. It’s just kind of a friendly talk, you know, in a common-sense way.”

Mr. Kernan deliberated. Mr. M’Coy said:

“Father Tom Burke, that was the boy!”

“O, Father Tom Burke,” said Mr. Cunningham, “that was a born orator. Did you ever hear him, Tom?”

“Did I ever hear him!” said the invalid, nettled. “Rather! I heard him….”

“And yet they say he wasn’t much of a theologian,” said Mr Cunningham.

“Is that so?” said Mr. M’Coy.

“O, of course, nothing wrong, you know. Only sometimes, they say, he didn’t preach what was quite orthodox.”

“Ah!… he was a splendid man,” said Mr. M’Coy.

“I heard him once,” Mr. Kernan continued. “I forget the subject of his discourse now. Crofton and I were in the back of the… pit, you know… the——”

“The body,” said Mr. Cunningham.

“Yes, in the back near the door. I forget now what…. O yes, it was on the Pope, the late Pope. I remember it well. Upon my word it was magnificent, the style of the oratory. And his voice! God! hadn’t he a voice! The Prisoner of the Vatican, he called him. I remember Crofton saying to me when we came out——”

“But he’s an Orangeman, Crofton, isn’t he?” said Mr. Power.

“‘Course he is,” said Mr. Kernan, “and a damned decent Orangeman too. We went into Butler’s in Moore Street—faith, I was genuinely moved, tell you the God’s truth—and I remember well his very words. ‘Kernan,’ he said, ‘we worship at different altars, he said, but our belief is the same.’ Struck me as very well put.”

“There’s a good deal in that,” said Mr. Power. “There used always to be crowds of Protestants in the chapel where Father Tom was preaching.”

“There’s not much difference between us,” said Mr. M’Coy.

“We both believe in——”

He hesitated for a moment.

“… in the Redeemer. Only they don’t believe in the Pope and in the mother of God.”

“But, of course,” said Mr. Cunningham quietly and effectively, “our religion is the religion, the old, original faith.”

“Not a doubt of it,” said Mr. Kernan warmly.

Mrs. Kernan came to the door of the bedroom and announced:

“Here’s a visitor for you!”

“Who is it?”

“Mr. Fogarty.”

“O, come in! come in!”

A pale, oval face came forward into the light. The arch of its fair trailing moustache was repeated in the fair eyebrows looped above pleasantly astonished eyes. Mr. Fogarty was a modest grocer. He had failed in business in a licensed house in the city because his financial condition had constrained him to tie himself to second-class distillers and brewers. He had opened a small shop on Glasnevin Road where, he flattered himself, his manners would ingratiate him with the housewives of the district. He bore himself with a certain grace, complimented little children and spoke with a neat enunciation. He was not without culture.

Mr. Fogarty brought a gift with him, a half-pint of special whisky. He inquired politely for Mr. Kernan, placed his gift on the table and sat down with the company on equal terms. Mr. Kernan appreciated the gift all the more since he was aware that there was a small account for groceries unsettled between him and Mr. Fogarty. He said:

“I wouldn’t doubt you, old man. Open that, Jack, will you?”

Mr. Power again officiated. Glasses were rinsed and five small measures of whisky were poured out. This new influence enlivened the conversation. Mr. Fogarty, sitting on a small area of the chair, was specially interested.

“Pope Leo XIII,” said Mr. Cunningham, “was one of the lights of the age. His great idea, you know, was the union of the Latin and Greek Churches. That was the aim of his life.”

“I often heard he was one of the most intellectual men in Europe,” said Mr. Power. “I mean, apart from his being Pope.”

“So he was,” said Mr. Cunningham, “if not the most so. His motto, you know, as Pope, was Lux upon Lux—Light upon Light.”

“No, no,” said Mr. Fogarty eagerly. “I think you’re wrong there. It was Lux in Tenebris, I think—Light in Darkness.”

“O yes,” said Mr. M’Coy, “Tenebrae.”

“Allow me,” said Mr. Cunningham positively, “it was Lux upon Lux. And Pius IX his predecessor’s motto was Crux upon Crux—that is, Cross upon Cross—to show the difference between their two pontificates.”

The inference was allowed. Mr. Cunningham continued.

“Pope Leo, you know, was a great scholar and a poet.”

“He had a strong face,” said Mr. Kernan.

“Yes,” said Mr. Cunningham. “He wrote Latin poetry.”

“Is that so?” said Mr. Fogarty.

Mr. M’Coy tasted his whisky contentedly and shook his head with a double intention, saying:

“That’s no joke, I can tell you.”

“We didn’t learn that, Tom,” said Mr. Power, following Mr. M’Coy’s example, “when we went to the penny-a-week school.”

“There was many a good man went to the penny-a-week school with a sod of turf under his oxter,” said Mr. Kernan sententiously. “The old system was the best: plain honest education. None of your modern trumpery….”

“Quite right,” said Mr. Power.

“No superfluities,” said Mr. Fogarty.

He enunciated the word and then drank gravely.

“I remember reading,” said Mr. Cunningham, “that one of Pope Leo’s poems was on the invention of the photograph—in Latin, of course.”

“On the photograph!” exclaimed Mr. Kernan.

“Yes,” said Mr. Cunningham.

He also drank from his glass.

“Well, you know,” said Mr. M’Coy, “isn’t the photograph wonderful when you come to think of it?”

“O, of course,” said Mr. Power, “great minds can see things.”

“As the poet says: Great minds are very near to madness,” said Mr. Fogarty.

Mr. Kernan seemed to be troubled in mind. He made an effort to recall the Protestant theology on some thorny points and in the end addressed Mr. Cunningham.

“Tell me, Martin,” he said. “Weren’t some of the popes—of course, not our present man, or his predecessor, but some of the old popes—not exactly… you know… up to the knocker?”

There was a silence. Mr. Cunningham said

“O, of course, there were some bad lots… But the astonishing thing is this. Not one of them, not the biggest drunkard, not the most… out-and-out ruffian, not one of them ever preached ex cathedra a word of false doctrine. Now isn’t that an astonishing thing?”

“That is,” said Mr. Kernan.

“Yes, because when the Pope speaks ex cathedra,” Mr. Fogarty explained, “he is infallible.”

“Yes,” said Mr. Cunningham.

“O, I know about the infallibility of the Pope. I remember I was younger then…. Or was it that——?”

Mr. Fogarty interrupted. He took up the bottle and helped the others to a little more. Mr. M’Coy, seeing that there was not enough to go round, pleaded that he had not finished his first measure. The others accepted under protest. The light music of whisky falling into glasses made an agreeable interlude.

“What’s that you were saying, Tom?” asked Mr. M’Coy.

“Papal infallibility,” said Mr. Cunningham, “that was the greatest scene in the whole history of the Church.”

“How was that, Martin?” asked Mr. Power.

Mr. Cunningham held up two thick fingers.

“In the sacred college, you know, of cardinals and archbishops and bishops there were two men who held out against it while the others were all for it. The whole conclave except these two was unanimous. No! They wouldn’t have it!”

“Ha!” said Mr. M’Coy.

“And they were a German cardinal by the name of Dolling… or Dowling… or——”

“Dowling was no German, and that’s a sure five,” said Mr. Power, laughing.

“Well, this great German cardinal, whatever his name was, was one; and the other was John MacHale.”

“What?” cried Mr. Kernan. “Is it John of Tuam?”

“Are you sure of that now?” asked Mr. Fogarty dubiously. “I thought it was some Italian or American.”

“John of Tuam,” repeated Mr. Cunningham, “was the man.”

He drank and the other gentlemen followed his lead. Then he resumed:

“There they were at it, all the cardinals and bishops and archbishops from all the ends of the earth and these two fighting dog and devil until at last the Pope himself stood up and declared infallibility a dogma of the Church ex cathedra. On the very moment John MacHale, who had been arguing and arguing against it, stood up and shouted out with the voice of a lion: ‘Credo!’”

“I believe!” said Mr. Fogarty.

“Credo!” said Mr. Cunningham. “That showed the faith he had. He submitted the moment the Pope spoke.”

“And what about Dowling?” asked Mr. M’Coy.

“The German cardinal wouldn’t submit. He left the church.”

Mr. Cunningham’s words had built up the vast image of the church in the minds of his hearers. His deep, raucous voice had thrilled them as it uttered the word of belief and submission. When Mrs. Kernan came into the room, drying her hands she came into a solemn company. She did not disturb the silence, but leaned over the rail at the foot of the bed.

“I once saw John MacHale,” said Mr. Kernan, “and I’ll never forget it as long as I live.”

He turned towards his wife to be confirmed.

“I often told you that?”

Mrs. Kernan nodded.

“It was at the unveiling of Sir John Gray’s statue. Edmund Dwyer Gray was speaking, blathering away, and here was this old fellow, crabbed-looking old chap, looking at him from under his bushy eyebrows.”

Mr. Kernan knitted his brows and, lowering his head like an angry bull, glared at his wife.

“God!” he exclaimed, resuming his natural face, “I never saw such an eye in a man’s head. It was as much as to say: I have you properly taped, my lad. He had an eye like a hawk.”

“None of the Grays was any good,” said Mr. Power.

There was a pause again. Mr. Power turned to Mrs. Kernan and said with abrupt joviality:

“Well, Mrs. Kernan, we’re going to make your man here a good holy pious and God-fearing Roman Catholic.”

He swept his arm round the company inclusively.

“We’re all going to make a retreat together and confess our sins—and God knows we want it badly.”

“I don’t mind,” said Mr. Kernan, smiling a little nervously.

Mrs. Kernan thought it would be wiser to conceal her satisfaction. So she said:

“I pity the poor priest that has to listen to your tale.”

Mr. Kernan’s expression changed.

“If he doesn’t like it,” he said bluntly, “he can… do the other thing. I’ll just tell him my little tale of woe. I’m not such a bad fellow——”

Mr. Cunningham intervened promptly.

“We’ll all renounce the devil,” he said, “together, not forgetting his works and pomps.”

“Get behind me, Satan!” said Mr. Fogarty, laughing and looking at the others.

Mr. Power said nothing. He felt completely out-generalled. But a pleased expression flickered across his face.

“All we have to do,” said Mr. Cunningham, “is to stand up with lighted candles in our hands and renew our baptismal vows.”

“O, don’t forget the candle, Tom,” said Mr. M’Coy, “whatever you do.”

“What?” said Mr. Kernan. “Must I have a candle?”

“O yes,” said Mr. Cunningham.

“No, damn it all,” said Mr. Kernan sensibly, “I draw the line there. I’ll do the job right enough. I’ll do the retreat business and confession, and… all that business. But… no candles! No, damn it all, I bar the candles!”

He shook his head with farcical gravity.

“Listen to that!” said his wife.

“I bar the candles,” said Mr. Kernan, conscious of having created an effect on his audience and continuing to shake his head to and fro. “I bar the magic-lantern business.”

Everyone laughed heartily.

“There’s a nice Catholic for you!” said his wife.

“No candles!” repeated Mr. Kernan obdurately. “That’s off!”

The transept of the Jesuit Church in Gardiner Street was almost full; and still at every moment gentlemen entered from the side door and, directed by the lay-brother, walked on tiptoe along the aisles until they found seating accommodation. The gentlemen were all well dressed and orderly. The light of the lamps of the church fell upon an assembly of black clothes and white collars, relieved here and there by tweeds, on dark mottled pillars of green marble and on lugubrious canvases. The gentlemen sat in the benches, having hitched their trousers slightly above their knees and laid their hats in security. They sat well back and gazed formally at the distant speck of red light which was suspended before the high altar.

In one of the benches near the pulpit sat Mr. Cunningham and Mr. Kernan. In the bench behind sat Mr. M’Coy alone: and in the bench behind him sat Mr. Power and Mr. Fogarty. Mr. M’Coy had tried unsuccessfully to find a place in the bench with the others, and, when the party had settled down in the form of a quincunx, he had tried unsuccessfully to make comic remarks. As these had not been well received, he had desisted. Even he was sensible of the decorous atmosphere and even he began to respond to the religious stimulus. In a whisper, Mr. Cunningham drew Mr. Kernan’s attention to Mr. Harford, the moneylender, who sat some distance off, and to Mr. Fanning, the registration agent and mayor maker of the city, who was sitting immediately under the pulpit beside one of the newly elected councillors of the ward. To the right sat old Michael Grimes, the owner of three pawnbroker’s shops, and Dan Hogan’s nephew, who was up for the job in the Town Clerk’s office. Farther in front sat Mr. Hendrick, the chief reporter of The Freeman’s Journal, and poor O’Carroll, an old friend of Mr. Kernan’s, who had been at one time a considerable commercial figure. Gradually, as he recognised familiar faces, Mr. Kernan began to feel more at home. His hat, which had been rehabilitated by his wife, rested upon his knees. Once or twice he pulled down his cuffs with one hand while he held the brim of his hat lightly, but firmly, with the other hand.

A powerful-looking figure, the upper part of which was draped with a white surplice, was observed to be struggling into the pulpit. Simultaneously the congregation unsettled, produced handkerchiefs and knelt upon them with care. Mr. Kernan followed the general example. The priest’s figure now stood upright in the pulpit, two-thirds of its bulk, crowned by a massive red face, appearing above the balustrade.

Father Purdon knelt down, turned towards the red speck of light and, covering his face with his hands, prayed. After an interval, he uncovered his face and rose. The congregation rose also and settled again on its benches. Mr. Kernan restored his hat to its original position on his knee and presented an attentive face to the preacher. The preacher turned back each wide sleeve of his surplice with an elaborate large gesture and slowly surveyed the array of faces. Then he said:

“For the children of this world are wiser in their generation than the children of light. Wherefore make unto yourselves friends out of the mammon of iniquity so that when you die they may receive you into everlasting dwellings.”

Father Purdon developed the text with resonant assurance. It was one of the most difficult texts in all the Scriptures, he said, to interpret properly. It was a text which might seem to the casual observer at variance with the lofty morality elsewhere preached by Jesus Christ. But, he told his hearers, the text had seemed to him specially adapted for the guidance of those whose lot it was to lead the life of the world and who yet wished to lead that life not in the manner of worldlings. It was a text for business men and professional men. Jesus Christ, with His divine understanding of every cranny of our human nature, understood that all men were not called to the religious life, that by far the vast majority were forced to live in the world, and, to a certain extent, for the world: and in this sentence He designed to give them a word of counsel, setting before them as exemplars in the religious life those very worshippers of Mammon who were of all men the least solicitous in matters religious.

He told his hearers that he was there that evening for no terrifying, no extravagant purpose; but as a man of the world speaking to his fellow-men. He came to speak to business men and he would speak to them in a businesslike way. If he might use the metaphor, he said, he was their spiritual accountant; and he wished each and every one of his hearers to open his books, the books of his spiritual life, and see if they tallied accurately with conscience.

Jesus Christ was not a hard taskmaster. He understood our little failings, understood the weakness of our poor fallen nature, understood the temptations of this life. We might have had, we all had from time to time, our temptations: we might have, we all had, our failings. But one thing only, he said, he would ask of his hearers. And that was: to be straight and manly with God. If their accounts tallied in every point to say:

“Well, I have verified my accounts. I find all well.”

But if, as might happen, there were some discrepancies, to admit the truth, to be frank and say like a man:

“Well, I have looked into my accounts. I find this wrong and this wrong. But, with God’s grace, I will rectify this and this. I will set right my accounts.”

Two little words – by these I mean, “the end”. Not something you see stamped on the end of books these days, but it’s hard to resist once you have finally completed that first draft.

It felt good to stick it on the end of The Orpheus Project. I took down 50,000 words of it during Nanowrimo last November. It has taken five months to add another 35,000.

Now begins the horrible task of reading it over, redrafting and cutting. It may require emergency surgery. We need an adjectectomy here, stat! We’re losing it! One, two, three, CLEAR!

Redrafting and revising is the time when a writer’s self-doubt is indulged and cozened. You wonder what on earth you were thinking, spotting the glaringly obvious mistakes, the bits where you ran out of steam, the continuity errors. The latter will be particularly painful to anyone who has ever watched one of those “great movie mistakes” clip shows. There are bastards out there among us, alive and well, who notice when the colour of a coffee cup changes from one movie scene to another; not only that, but they note it all down and then put it on the internet. They’ll have a day at the seaside with my first draft, with the characters’ names, occupations and even personalities changing from one chapter to another.

I revved up as the end got closer. I’d like to think this was as a result of joie de vivre with the finish line coming up, or a more cerebral pleasure from tying up all the strands of story in as logical a fashion as possible.

I have to tell you, though, that it’s got more to do with the fact that there was a lot of fighting and violence, and the baddies were paid off handsomely. Maybe this is the essence of every story, whether you employ gunfire and kung fu or more subtle dramatic devices: righting wrongs. Putting something in order.

The act of redrafting is one where you have to give thanks to computing and the modern world. The idea of taking a first draft, and then re-typing the bugger again, is almost too much to bear. Tolkien did it for Lord of the Rings. Can you imagine that? And then he probably had to type it again. Unbelievable. Or think of Steinbeck, drafting The Grapes of Wrath on yellow legal pads. Some poor bugger had to type that, correct it, type it again. Jesus! It’s a labour of Hercules compared to cutting, pasting, saving and deleting. Small mercies.

Endings in books tend to be more about finding the right lines to finish up with rather than a sock in the jaw. As we prepare for Baz Luhrmann’s typically-understated style being brought to bear on The Great Gatsby, we call to mind Fitzgerald’s elegant sign-off: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

I detect a little of that in Hunter S Thompson’s reflections on the 1960s, as he experiences a calm interlude in a Las Vegas hotel in Fear and Loathing. “So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.” One curiosity about Hunter S Thompson is that he re-typed Gatsby – all of it – in a bid to imbibe Fitzgerald’s style.

In Ulysses, James Joyce went for the more blunt, but no less memorable “and yes I said yes I will Yes”, with Molly Bloom in mid-flow. But for an exclamation mark finish, I’ve always been partial to Iain Banks’ The Crow Road and its exhilarating exhalation, “Ha!” – somewhat unjustly overlook in favour of the book’s now legendary opener: “It was the day my grandmother exploded.”

Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale finished off with a horribly tart end quote from James Bond, not quite the words of a dashing English hero: “The bitch is dead.”

Films, necessarily, give you more of a punch. When it comes to sorting out baddies, The French Connection 2 is probably my favourite – John Frankenheimer’s sequel as emphatic in its last shot as the conclusion to William Friedkin’s original was ambiguous. Pow!

In terms of tone, I’ve always loved the finish to John Carpenter’s The Thing. After the special effects and pyrotechnics have settled down, you simply have two surviving characters, one or both of whom may not be quite what they seem. It’s an understated way to end a film which is about jolting, horrific shocks.

With The Orpheus Project I’ve gone more elegiac – my heroine, Serena Byrne, is given a moment of reflection which I scrupulously denied her in the preceding 300-odd pages of suspense, action and intrigue. A moment to reflect on people no longer with her, people she’s lost throughout her life. I hope it strikes the right note.

Of course, the end note on any piece of text comes from the reader, not the writer. You would hope they would say: “Ah – quite enjoyed that,” rather than “thank God that’s over”.

Or even worse, the last line they experience might be halfway through your book, when they decide life’s too short, and read something else.

But so much for that.

Now, where did I put the thesaurus?

Jorge Luis Borges

The Signifying Corpse: Re-Reading Kristeva on Marguerite Duras by Karen Piper [PDF]: “Moderato cantabile, far from the sweet and melodious story the title suggests, is centred around the sound of a scream.”

A Dictionary of Borges [PDF] by Evelyn Fishburn and Psiche Hughes (Forewords by Mario Vargas Llosa and Anthony Burgess).

One of my favourite of JG Ballard’s short stories: The Concentration City [PDF].

Jonathan McCalmont’s perceptive analysis of the ambiguities of the brilliant film Fish Tank.

Sex and Gender in Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex [PDF] by Judith Butler. “In fact, we can see in The Second Sex an effort to radicalize the Sartrian program to establish an embodied notion of freedom.”

A Writer from Chicago [PDF] by Saul Bellow. “Neither in brash, and now demoralised, Chicago nor in New York, the capital of victorious mass culture (American culture is the culture of the TV networks), will any writer try to live like an artist. If he is a person of any degree of seriousness, why would he want to?”

James Joyce’s sublime A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man [PDF-Full].

Complete Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy in PDF – 3 books. This is Longfellow’s translation.

The Library of Babel [PDF] by Jorge Luis Borges.

A wonderful Anne Carson essay, Contempts [PDF] .

Patrick Leigh Fermor: We May Just Forget to Die [PDF] by Margot Demopoulos.

Gabriel Josipovici’s brilliant Kafka essay: Why we don’t understand Kafka.

James Joyce’s essential Ulysses [PDF-Full].

Two by Friedrich Nietzsche: my favourite Ecce Homo (How One Becomes What One Is) and The Antichrist (A Curse on Christianity) [PDF]. A new translation by Thomas Wayne.

Eighteen chapters, six hundred and forty-four pages, a quarter of a million words, and seven years in the writing.  Over a hundred characters, more idioms, neologisms, and colloquialisms than you can count. Add plots, sub-plots, mini-plots, allusions, correspondences, every rhetorical device listed by Quintillian and then some, a potted history (by example) of the English language since the second century A.D. One single sentence containing 4,930 words … Ulysses is not for the faint hearted.

Walking Ulysses sets out to reconstruct the Dublin of June 16th, 1904, the one experienced by Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses.

Using digital mapping and multimedia, overlaying modern maps with contemporary, recommending easily walkable chapters and taking you footstep by footstep through Bloomsday, it is a phenomenal achievement.

Click here to view the project, or for some further reading here’s Matthew Battles’s piece from Boston College Magazine in late 2010:

The goal is to produce at once a map and a catalogue of Joycean detail—to make it possible for an individual to step out onto the streets of 21st-century Dublin with a laptop or smart phone and follow the skein of ways, the lattice of coincidences and synchronicities, raveled by Joyce’s characters.

Edna O’Brien, now into her 80s, made an appearance at the Cúirt International Festival of Literature last week, when she was interviewed by Vincent Woods about last year’s memoir, Country Girl.

But it’s a piece from overseas that I’m including here, a review of that book by Dwight Garner in the New York Times last weekend.

With references to Paul McCartney, Marlon Brando, Robert Mitchum, Norman Mailer, Samuel Beckett, Marianne Faithfull, Sean Connery, Princess Margaret, Jane Fonda, Philip Roth, Gunter Grass, Jackie Kennedy-Onassis, there’s no doubt she had, as Garner writes:

an outsize life to match her outsize talent

Read Dwight Garner’s review of Country Girl here

Returning to the New York Times again (unfortunately, whereas the New York Times  has been bringing readers plenty of interesting stuff about Irish writers, the seventh most recent piece on independent.ie is a news item from two weeks ago on Dan Brown’s impending visit to the Dublin Writers’ Festival), there was an insightful little interview this week with Colm Tóibín, who learned that his Broadway play had been nominated for a Tony award – an hour before he learned that the play was being cut due to poor ticket sales.

Asked how he took the news, he said:

[D]ark laughter might be the best way to put it. And when in doubt, consult Oscar Wilde … He has a quote – success is merely a preparation for failure. Anyone who works in the arts knows, if you’re writing a novel or a play or anything, you have to be ready for someone to say, [your] time is up.

Read Patrick Healy’s Q&A interview with Colm Tóibín here

The Gallery Press in rural Co Meath (website here, Facebook page here) has long been recognised as one of Ireland’s leading publishers of poetry. On the blog this week they pointed readers in the direction of their Poem of the Month, which is, rather suitably, “May” by Kerrie Hardie.

I’m also enjoying their series of low-tech but very worthwhile YouTube videos of some of their poets reading their work.

The latest one is of Tom French, who daylights as executive librarian of the Meath library service, reading a poem from his 2009 collection The Fire Step, namely “Gogarty’s Printers, Kilmainhamwood”:

I’m standing now
Standing on the edge
Wondering how,
I got here to begin with
And I’m looking down
Wondering,
Just wondering
Because it seems like such a far way down
How did I get here?
And why am I still standing?
I think I feel like jumping
Just to feel alive;
Cool breeze as I fall down

I’ve fallen off the map
So where is there left to go?
I’m passed the world’s edge
And beyond the compass rose
Nothing here’s familiar
And still it all feels the same
But I think I’ll just keep falling
Until I’m upside down
No use in stalling
Because I’m already here
Or I’ve been here for some time
It’s all lost within my mind
And everything, everything
Is so absolutely new

And I think that I’m afraid
But I think I don’t know why
I don’t want to close my eyes
Because I don’t want to miss a thing
How will we understand?
If we never try
To dive off the edge
To see what’s on the other side
Uncharted waters left un-sailed
Will only turn to fear
But I won’t let that happen
Not now, not here
For your sake and mine;
It could spell adventure
If we learn to read
In between the lines
See what can’t be seen.
Because it’s the words we left unsaid,
The things we’ve left undone
That tend to do the most
When things are said and done,
The clocks have finally won.

I think that I’m afraid to think
That this is the end
And
I think that I’m afraid that
This is where everything
Truly begins
And
I think that I’m afraid
To hold a single hope either way

_______________________________________________________

This is a bit of an experiment in poetry. I wrote it around the time I was reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (by James Joyce) and as a result I sort of ended up writing a stream of consciousness poem.

We sat there in my hot, white S-10 pickup truck and her words hit like a purposeful blow to the gut.

“No.”

She said it so matter-of-factly that it caught me completely off guard. When I asked her why, cause I didn’t know what else to say, she said, “We’re both too young to be committed and you’re moving off to college soon.”

I didn’t really want to hear her reason, I just wanted her to say yes. As a writer, rejection is a major part of the process. You will hear no many more times than you hear yes. Lit agents, publishing companies, and even some readers. You can learn from the no’s, however. There is usually a reason behind their no.

Sometimes it’s simply because the agent is too busy to take on a new client or it’s just not their taste. Other times your writing needs to be improved before it can be published. I received 22 rejections from lit agents and 2 rejections from publishing companies for THE EARTH BLEEDS RED. I also received serious interest from 2 lit agents and eventually signed directly with a publishing company because it felt like the right thing to do.

Here’s the bottom line: take rejection and build on it. Know that it’s only temporary and never permanent unless you make it permanent. Use the rejection as fuel to become better in your pursuit and strive for greatness. Below are a few examples of writers who dealt with rejection and became incredibly successful:

John Grisham received 25 rejections

The Help received 60 rejection letters

James Joyce got 22 rejection letters for The Dubliners and sold only 300 copies in its first year, 120 of which he bought himself

READING NEXT: The Big Bounce by Elmore Leonard