I try every year in late December and early January to read two things: Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and James Joyce’s “The Dead.” I try to finish Dickens’s story of Scrooge and his ghosts before midnight on Christmas Eve. Last year–last month–I finished it around 6:30 PM that evening. Then I try to finish Joyce’s story of Gabriel Conroy and his ghosts by midnight on January 6th (aka Epiphany and, I just learned from Silas House’s blog, Old Christmas). This year I finished it around nine o’clock. (I would have finished it much earlier, but I was distracted by the attack on the U.S. Capitol by domestic terrorists: #AmericanTerrorists.)

The last piece in Joyce’s 1914 story collection Dubliners, “The Dead” is often praised as one of the greatest short stories written in English. It’s a wonderful narrative of Dublin life as it convenes at the home of elderly Julia and Kate Morkan and their niece Mary Jane. The evening is experienced most vividly through the perceptions–and misperceptions–of the Misses Morkan’s nephew Gabriel Conroy. Joyce brings to rich life the social event that swirls around Gabriel and then follows this central character to a solitary ending, including one of the most beautiful paragraphs in all of English literature:

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

This is the kind of literary beauty to which many of us who write aspire. One form such aspirations can take, at least initially, is that of imitation. New York Times bestselling author Silas House, for example, took up Joyce’s “The Dead” and adapted it to an Appalachian setting and called it “Another Country.” On his blog, A Country Boy Can Surmise, House writes of Joyce’s story and his,

“The Dead” by James Joyce is one of my favorite pieces of writing to have ever been written.  A few years ago I was teaching the story in Ireland and it struck me that many of the issues being explored in the short story are still pertinent in my homeland today.  Themes such as the complications of being loyal to your own place in the world, choosing sides, homesickness, and the way a culture can become so immersed in the past that it threatens to impede its own progress.  I do not think there is any way to improve upon Joyce’s story but I did think it’d be interesting to pick up the story from early 1900s Ireland and move it to contemporary Appalachia. . . .

As I mentioned above, I finished my mostly annual reading to “The Dead” yesterday, January 6, 2021, and I was pleased to learn of House’s “Another Country” today. I read it and enjoyed the way the adaptation works in its migration from a big house in Dublin, Ireland, to a farmhouse just outside Manchester, Kentucky.

Recently, I had a similar impulse to capture something of Joyce’s “The Dead” in a piece of my own. My imitation took the form of a song that I titled “Michael Furey Is Dead.” The lyrics and the music attempt to recreate–to transfigure–the feeling I always have while reading the story from the moment Gabriel is watching his wife Gretta, where she stands on the stairs and listens to an Irish tenor sing “The Lass of Aughrim,” to Gabriel’s final moment at the window in their hotel room.

Michael Furey Is Dead

She stands on the stairs and listens
to the song floating down from above–
her face half hidden in shadow, half in light.
The ghost of a sad smile trembles
on her lips freshly colored with care.
I tremble at the sight,
and I wonder what she might be thinking.

She doesn’t know that I saw her
as we walk side by side on the street,
both acting just like we didn’t feel what we felt–
my tongue tripping over her mystery,
hers trying to cover it up.
I ask her if she’s well.
Then I beg for her to tell what she’s feeling.

Ooo Ooo Ooo—Michael Furey is dead—Ooo Ooo Ooo

Deep in the days of a cold and wet autumn,
they took waltzing walks through the woods.
A delicate boy and a handsome young woman they were.
She was an orphan with her aunt until winter,
when she’d pack up and go back to school,
and he worked in the mines
and coughed all the time they were dancing.

[brief waltzing interlude]

The weather turned black before she was to leave;
the rain fell without taking a breath.
The last twilight she saw Michael Furey alone ‘neath the trees.
She’d been back at school for only one week
when the letter arrived from her aunt.
And it brought her to her knees
with its news of Michael Furey’s passing.

Ooo Ooo Ooo—Michael Furey is dead—Ooo Ooo Ooo
Ooo Ooo Ooo—Michael Furey is dead—Ooo Ooo Ooo

I stand in the dark by the window and listen
as her sobs subside into sleep
and look for the ghost of the boy who died for love of my wife.
The stars hang in heaven like the caught breath of snow
or like sparkling rain in dark hair.
And I tremble at the sight,
and I wonder what she might be dreaming.
And I tremble deep inside,
and I’m afraid of what she might be dreaming.

Ooo Ooo Ooo—Michael Furey is dead—Ooo Ooo Ooo
Ooo Ooo Ooo—Michael Furey is dead—Ooo Ooo Ooo
Ooo Ooo Ooo—Michael Furey is dead—Ooo Ooo Ooo
Ooo Ooo Ooo—Michael Furey is dead—Ooo Ooo Ooo

I wish that I could post these words with their music, but I haven’t recorded it yet. It’s in a suitably minor key, I can assure you. And when I get around to recording it, the Ooos will likewise be suitably ghostly.