Dubliners

The only Dubliner I knew was named Ennis, just like “penis” without the P and except the E was pronounced as short I, so really it was more like “Guinness” without the “guh.” That was her last name anyway. Brown haired, green-eyed, dark brown freckles to match the hair—she was the portrait of Dublin. She was tall, long in every direction, and the worst tennis player I’ve ever seen, like she had grown faster than her flexibility could account for. Still, she lacked discouragement, and she played like she could see over the top of adolescence, knew she’d outgrow it. There was a grace to her ungainliness, like a joke played against her good nature to make others comfortable around her. I used to tease her about Leprechauns. “I assure you there are no Leprechauns in Ireland,” she’d say. I loved to hear her call her parents to come “collect” her.

Domestication breeds for large eyes and diminutive chin, the better to take a bit. Throw a group of people together for a thousand years and they’ll come out Irish. They’ll look like me. Put me in a pair of John Lennon glasses, and I could be James Joyce. Minus the moustache.

John Lennon stole those spectacles from James Joyce, don’t you think?

Nuclear physics gained the term “quark” from Joyce’s book, ULYSSES. I always meant to read it, especially after Hemingway writes about how dirty it is. But I have looked at PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN. It’s on my shelf of half read books, along with EAST OF EDEN, which I found south of good; and O LOST—I understand why the editor cut sixty-six thousand words (book length) from that manuscript to make LOOK HOMEWARD ANGEL. PORTRAIT is high-falutin’, high style, Catholic guilt set against sins of the flesh. PORTRAIT isn’t even a long book, I just got tired of the nail bitingly pretty language all the way down to the spine.

James Joyce was a famous Dubliner, you may have heard of him. Wrote a stack of tales about people of that city, put them into a collection called DUBLINERS.

Most of the DUBLINERS’ tales are well rounded, so much so that it’s hard to get a footing on what is interesting beyond reality. They have a beginning, middle, and end, just most of them aren’t very interesting. They play out as pale allegory to something, but what? Their artistic nuance is far too great for me.

“After the Race” is worth its weight in spit more than any of them. A dumb little guy who makes bad bets, but enjoys himself doing it. Cars careering is something any NASCAR fan would like.

“Counterparts” is a chilling tale of a father who comes home to beat his son.

“A Painful Case” has a ring tone of ROMEO AND JUIETTE.

“A Little Cloud” has the most potential of all of the stories in DUBLINERS. Someone could do something with it, expand the storyline, stretch out the metaphor into a novel-sized portion. Now that could be really good. “A Little Cloud” could be interesting, especially with the right writer behind it.

I remember reading “Araby” in high school. I remember because I was expecting something very different from what it is. I thought it was going to be related to ARABIAN NIGHTS, not about boyhood crush. As it is, it isn’t bad. I don’t see the significance of the geography, though. It doesn’t matter where it happened; boyhood crush is common human experience. It could have happened anywhere, even in Arabia.

And the other tales are also common human experiences—death, love, expectation, unrequitement, longing, loneliness, politics, scrutiny, corruption, wickedness, betrayal, crookedness, shame, honor, pride, drinking, murder, redemption, suicide—a paddy wagon full of things that happen to these people, these Irish people who are living in Dublin. One tale doesn’t relate to another tale, only the streets sometimes cross paths story to story. It is a grouping of collected experience of a population of one time and place, an anthropological drawing, but not terribly provocative fiction.

My grandmother’s family emigrated from Ireland in the Sixteen Hundreds. Before that, they had been Catholic. They dropped the “O” off their name into the Atlantic Ocean and arrived in the United States as Protestants. So I think I have a genetic predisposition to reject Joyce’s characters. They’re the branch of family we moved away from. If it ain’t brogue, don’t fix it.

Thank goodness for the Ennis of tennis. Without her, I’d have no good opinion whatsoever of Dubliners.