No. 15 Usher’s Island Restored

No. 15 Usher’s Island, the house in Dublin made immortal by James Joyce in “The Dead”, has been rescued from obscurity and dereliction. To make room for a new bridge over the Liffey, the house was going to be torn down. However – it was bought, in order to be preserved by June 16, 2004 – (the 100th anniversary of “Bloomsday” – the day on which the entirety of James Joyce’s Ulysses takes place.)

No. 15 Usher’s Island — the “dark, gaunt house” on the south quays of Dublin’s River Liffey immortalized in Joyce’s best-known short story “The Dead” — very nearly didn’t survive the passage of time.

When Dublin barrister and Joyce fan Brendan Kilty bought the four-story Georgian building three years ago, it was little more than a wreck, testimony to the local authority’s failure to protect Dublin’s illustrious heritage.

The top floor had been torn down to save its then owners the trouble of patching up a leaking roof, while the back wall was bowed to the point of near collapse.

“We removed two buckets of syringes from the ground floor alone — it was a total squat,” said Kilty, who set about transforming what he considers one of the world’s premier literary addresses.

I particularly liked the quotes from Joycean scholar David Norris, who “first identified the house as the setting for Joyce’s masterpiece 30 years ago.”

Norris says, in regards to Usher’s Island, and Dublin’s literary history in general:

“People used to say if you threw a stone in Grafton Street you were sure to hit a poet…Well, if you throw a stone anywhere in Dublin you’re sure of hitting some kind of literary landmark, but you can’t preserve them all.”

I was glad to see the article make this essential point:

Of course, the irony is that the pride Dublin now takes in its most famous author wasn’t reciprocated by Joyce who held ambivalent feelings about his home city and spent most of his life abroad.

Kilty readily admitted that early 20th century Ireland was undoubtedly a very stifling atmosphere for creative artists, with a hangover of morals from the Victorian era.

Brendan Kilty heads up the restoration effort at Usher’s Island – he is a barrister, as well as a huge James Joyce fan. He sounds like a bit of a … well, a bit of a puff-puff – making references about how “everything will fall into place” – clearly echoing the famous last lines of “The Dead”. Ah, well. We all have our passions.

James Joyce makes people a bit nutty. He makes me a bit nutty.

I’ve gotta think up something very GRAND to do this year for Bloomsday.

(hat tip: Noggie)

For those of you interested in such obsessive events as Bloomsday, here is my post from last year – describing June 16, 2003, spent with my Irish friend Aedin at a bar called, appropriately, “Ulysses”. The post, as usual, takes a meandering turn – describing my walk around Ground Zero, to get to my Bloomsday party.

Bloomsday, June 16, 2003
Friend Aedin called me yesterday, late in the afternoon, in the middle of my own James Joyce mania, and invited me downtown (wayyyy downtown) to the opening of a new bar called Ulysses, where a Bloomsday celebration was in full swing. Twas fortuitous.

So I found my way there, which was a bit arduous. I had to get to Hanover Square, a teeny little park squashed down between towering Wall Street buildings. Closer to the East River than the Hudson. As a matter of fact, Hanover Square was so far east that to my left, as I walked there, I could see the gleaming river a block away, and the buildings in Brooklyn on the other side. It felt a bit like Chicago: being in a large city, but always being aware of the nearness of a large body of water just blocks away. It changes the feeling of a city. Opens it up, lets in possibility, excitement. It was significantly chillier downtown, because of the wind tunnels created by all those tall buildings crowded in upon one another. The night was beautiful, perfection. It was only six o’clock, so the sun still was up, but again, because it’s all very tall buildings down there (as opposed to Chelsea or the Village) it felt like night-time.

Because I didn’t know exactly where I was going, and because I wasn’t clear on the exact way to get there (and neither was Aedin, all she said was, “It’s really far down”), I took the C train to Chambers.

New Yorkers will hear me say “I took the C train to Chambers” and will know what that means. It’s the World Trade Center site. It’s the train I used to take for my Monday night classes at the World Trade Center. It’s the train I would take to go see my sister Siobhan play at a bar called The Orange Bear, a block away from the World Trade. I never have a reason to go that far downtown anymore, so any time I do, like last night, what the f*** has happened hits me in the face all over again.

The Chambers Street subway stop is huge. The platforms in between the trains are enormous, to handle the once-massive throngs of commuters pouring into the WTC on a daily basis. Also, subway platforms usually have concrete floors, stained, damp in spots, kind of gross, whatever, it’s a subway. But not at Chambers. Not for the white-collar commuters and tourists. It’s a tile floor down there. Shiny, immaculate. So the whole place looks different. For the most part, before September 11, the only time I was in that subway station was at around 6:30 pm, racing down to the WTC for my class, just as everybody else was pouring OUT of WTC to go home. I had to literally beat my way through the crowds. The words “sea of people” would be appropriate. Making my way thru the turnstile to get OUT of the subway station was like going into battle. I would have to negotiate with the 50 people lined up to come through the same turnstile going INTO the subway station. It was absolutely insane. I never got used to it. Even as a New Yorker. That many people. At rush hour.

Now, of course, the Chambers Street station is very different. People still work downtown, obviously, but not at all to the degree when the WTC was still standing.

The second you step out of that train, you feel the difference.

You feel what has happened. You feel the impact, all over again. This is not an intellectual thing, this “feeling” does not come from your brain, or your memories of September 11, or from cerebral consciousnss, or anything like that. It has nothing to do with anything that is WITHIN you. It is in the air down there. It is external. It is like how people describe what it feels like to visit Auschwitz, or Dachau. You are in the presence of something horrific. Something beyond belief. It is haunted. I am not speaking metaphorically, or in a new age-y way. I am speaking quite literally when I say the place is “haunted”. It is a place filled with ghosts. It has not recovered.

The space, the air, the ground itself has not recovered from what occurred there.

First of all, it was 6:15, 6:30, when I got out of the train which was my normal time to be down there, from the old days when I was at the WTC once a week. But the tiled clean subway station was nearly empty. Where was the “sea of people”? Maybe 10 people got off the train with me.

The place echoed with only a couple of footfalls. I was not used to the emptiness. I will never be used to the emptiness. I still thought to myself, “Wait a second…where is everybody?” And in the next second comes the impact. All over again.

It is a collective experience. I am not an individual when I go down to that area of town, the few times I have been down there since. You are no longer yourself, your individual self. You join the wider human family.

The feeling which pulsed insistently through New York City in the weeks after September 11, before dissipating into normalcy (or: an aftermath which masqueraded as normalcy: rude cab drivers, people bitching each other out on the street, etc.), is still alive downtown. The feeling of collective pain, of the importance of memory, the necessity of loving one another, of being kind and helpful to one another because we are all in this HELL together … All of that is felt, palpably, the second you get off the train. People speak in lowered respectful voices. You are in church.

Or, if not church, then a more generalized holy space. You hear people talk about the World Trade Center site as hallowed ground, and again, this is not an intellectual concept. It is reality. It is FELT, and palpably, in the air you breathe.

It is devastatingly sad. Too sad for tears. No response but silence is appropriate.

You emerge from the subway, and you are on the corner across the street from the big hole in the ground. St. Paul’s Church is right there, right beside you as you climb the stairs. The iron gates, wreathed with memorabilia, notes, flowers, flags, patches from firehouses all across the country, and the world. A firehouse from New Zealand, from Germany. The church is a miracle. Its story is well-known.

It’s not a holy place because it is a church. It stands on holy ground, is surrounded by holy air.

The hole across the street still shocks with its enormity.

The iron cross found in the rubble stands alone, behind the fence. People mill around. Tourists. But there is a pall over everything. You can feel it. It draped over you like a blanket. You can kind of forget about all of this uptown. But not down here. Never down here.

Later, Aedin said, “The souls are still here. I saw the bodies fall. The souls fall. And they’re still here.”

That is what is in the air. Not just memories of that day, but the actual souls of those who were lost.

There is nothing casual down there. I started south, looking for Hanover Square, but my thought-process was no longer of the normal going-to-meet-someone variety (as in “Okay, so it’s 6:15 … I think Hanover Square is off Liberty Street … Should I call Aedin and let her know I’m close?”) None of that. There was no thought-process at all. Just solemn awareness of the hallowed ground I was walking on.

The other thing I notice when I’m down there is: that the buildings surrounding, the ones that survived … it’s hard to really see them for what they are, just buildings, black glass, concrete, windows … because laid over them is an afterimage of what they looked like for weeks following the attack. Everything down there was covered in dust. The air was white with dust. You scuffed through it on the street. It covered your clothes, got in your throat. The buildings were veiled in white, blasted by the dust from the rubble. They looked completely different than the normal workaday buildings I saw before me. It is hard to put together the two images. It is hard to realize they are the same buildings.

It seems absolutely inconceivable that they are the same buildings.

I cannot imagine what it must be like for the people who still work down there, who deal with walking by that hole every day. I suppose anything can become relatively normal, with enough time. You get used to only having one leg, although you always miss having two.

By the time I found the bar “Ulysses” (which was hopping, it was the day of its opening) I was far enough away from the hole, I couldn’t see it anymore, that I was able to leave it behind. Momentarily.

The Bloomsday celebration was in full swing. TV cameras were there, the press.

I sat on a barstool, with Aedin, and her friends, all Irish, (no hyphens for them) and listened to people read excerpts from Ulysses, poems by Joyce, his broadsides.

There were a couple of singers there. An incredible Irish soprano, who sang “Danny Boy” with such a full and open throat that everybody was in tears. Another singer sang “The Lass of Aughrim”, and we all sang along. There were duets.

An Irish woman read from “The Citizen” in Ulysses, the section where two pages of names are rattled off. She plowed through, with her thick brogue, chewing up the names, spitting them out. As the list went on and on and on, and she never faltered and never paused, it got funnier and funnier and funnier. When she finished the list with a “take THAT” nod of her head, the place erupted into cheers.

Aedin read a bawdy poem with gusto.

Frank McCourt was there. Malachy McCourt was there.

Brian Mallon, who I actually know a little bit, from the Actors Studio, was the master of ceremonies. He was in Brian Friel’s Translations with my cousin, and he does an absolutely phenomenal one-man show about Richard Burton. I cannot recommend it enough, if you should ever notice that it has come to your area.

The bar was filled with the illustrious Irish citizens of New York. Actors, musicians, writers. Every single person, including myself, had their copy of Ulysses. The table was strewn with Xerox-ed pages from Ulysses, certain parts highlighted, written on, sections crossed out.

I felt like everybody was absolutely insane, and I felt like I was in perfect company.

All day long I had felt lonely for Ireland, lonely for people who were Irish, for people who were as into Bloomsday as I was, and then lo and behold, there I was, surrounded by more Irish-ness than I thought I could stand, singing “Danny Boy” at the top of my lungs with 30 other people, everybody wiping away tears.

Afterwards, I walked across lower Manhattan, through the wind tunnels, to take the ferry home, just the way I used to do after my Monday night classes. The night-time ferry ride home was one of my favorite rituals: Sitting on the roof deck of the ferry boat, watching Manhattan pull away from me. This is another thing I have not done since September 11. Before September 11, what had been most spectacular and overwhelming about the receding skyline, was obviously the World Trade. Impossibly high. Impossibly high and lit-up. Dwarfing everything else.

If the roof-deck was empty, I would lie on my back, and watch the towers move, float away, making myself dizzy.

I was the only one up on the roof, last night. I was feeling very Irish, the sounds of the brogues resonating through my head. Something in me had been satisfied.

But the floodlights from Ground Zero were sobering … You never forget. You never forget.

And now, when the boat pulled away, all I saw was empty dark sky above me. Which didn’t make me dizzy at all.

I’m not used to it.

I’m used to getting dizzy when that ferry first pulls away.

What comes to mind is a poem by Auden – “The More Loving One”. I know he’s not Irish, but that’s no matter. The truth expressed in the poem is one of the most difficult truths to accept on earth.

Oh, I fight with this poem. I fight tooth and nail.

It was the last stanza which came to my mind as the ferry pulled away, and I noticed how damned empty the sky was.

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.

God bless Ireland. God bless New York City. And happy Bloomsday.