What I Want to Tell Goes Like This
Page 16
And he wrote down, also, Nora’s tale of Michael Bodkin—which he gave to Gretta’s past, renaming Bodkin Michael Furey—wrote down the story of Bodkin’s serenade and Nora telling him about it that evening, after dinner at Café Miramar, in Pola, in 1904. We know this date because the next morning, December 3, 1904, Joyce wrote to his brother Stannie of Nora’s affair with a young suitor who died from tuberculosis, saying “She has told me something of her youth.” And sometime later he began “The Dead,” which he finished in Rome in 1907.
Tonight, all the faces of the dead are in the window. I’m in the window.
IN THEIR ROOM THAT night, after Nora told Joyce about Bodkin, and after he’d kissed her forehead and her earlobes and the lips that had so undone Eyers, she fell into a dry-eyed sleep next to him. Joyce lay on his side looking at the woman who had gone away with him into the continent, watching her eyelids twitch, and thinking not of the heroic suitor who braved death to sing this woman a song—as Gabriel thinks of Gretta’s suitor in Joyce’s story—but of how he might write it and what song he’d make the boy sing. He could hear the guttering candle at the bedside drip wax into the brass tray.
The story he wanted to write would take several years to fully arrive. And then it would be another seven years, a trial, a test of his bullheadedness, his pissy, uncompromising vision that was already old-fashioned and high- minded even as it was transgressive and new, to see it published. But that night he felt the story move in him and he tried to pay attention to it and in that state he recalled Odysseus’s descent into the underworld and how the shades floated out of the darkness towards the lost traveller and how the dead come forward on their own time. The dead exist in their own time.
“Christmas is a season for the dead,” he says to me in the window.
“Yes.”
“Even Mary took up with a ghost,” he says.
“The dead aren’t so different from us.”
“No,” he says and then he shows me a picture of Michael Bodkin taken in 1899, the year before he died. It’s brittle and cracked. Bodkin is just a boy. Clear-faced. Dark hair. Middle part. He wears a high white collar and a loose tie, a dark jacket and a waistcoat. He’s poor but doing his part to look good for the photograph. If anything, he looks stronger, more robust, than any picture of James Joyce. The smallest squall may be churning in a region of his lungs.
It’s so dark out the big window I can’t say if we’re moving.
Joyce has been carrying the photograph with him since his final visit to Ireland in 1912, two years before The Dubliners was published. On that trip, Nora and Joyce went west to Galway where they visited Rahoon Cemetery where Bodkin is buried in a dull stone crypt near the high gate. It was summer and the couple took a breezy bicycle ride past Fort Lorenzo into the northwestern corner of the city, where they could see the small Bay of Galway. The sun was wide open and Joyce had no clue of the ambush history had plotted him.
NOTES & ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
EARLIER VERSIONS OF SEVERAL of these stories appeared in the following publications:
“The Laurel Whalen” Grain
“In Russia” Event
“At the Lake” The Malahat Review
“All This Was a Long Time Ago” The Malahat Review
“Brighton, Where Are You?” Joyland
“First Women’s Battalion of Death” Joyland
“You Have to Think of Me What You Think of Me” The Rusty Toque
“Bearing the Body” The New Quarterly
“The Selected Kid Curry” Forget Magazine
Thank you to the editors of each.
A version of “The Children of the Great Strike, Vancouver Island, 1912–14,” made in collaboration with designer Sarah Kerr, previously appeared as a broadside art installation in the windows of several Cumberland, BC businesses. Thank you to Alberto Pozzolo, Sew What I Sew, Village Muse Bookstore, Seeds Food Market and the Cumberland Museum and Archives. Visit www.sarahkerrphotography.ca for more on Sarah’s work.
The epigraph from Peter Gizzi is from his book Threshold Songs and is used with permission.
The epigraph from Thomas Hardy is from his poem “Going and Staying” and is in the public domain.
The epigraph to “All This Was a Long Time Ago” is from T.S. Eliot’s poem “Journey of the Magi.”
The story “You Have to Think of Me What You Think of Me” borrows its title from Larry Levi’s poem “My Life in a Late Syle of Fire.”
I gratefully acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council, the Access Copyright Foundation and the University of British Columbia Okanagan.
A special thank you to the many friends and colleagues who gracefully offered essential feedback on various stories over the years: Darren Bifford, Treena Chambers, Evie Christie, Helen Guri, Steph Harrington, Jack Hodgins, Matthew Hooton, Chris Hutchinson, Will Johnson, Stephen Leckie, Amber McMillan, Grant Shilling, Traci Skuce, Michael V. Smith, Beth Turner and Melanie Willson.
Thank you to Ben Didier for yet another superb cover design. See more of Ben’s work at www.prettyugly.ca
Thank you to Silas White, Angela Caravan, Heather Lohnes and everyone at Nightwood Editions, purveyors of the finest books.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MATT RADER IS THE author of three books of poems: A Doctor Pedalled Her Bicycle Over the River Arno (House of Anansi, 2011), Living Things (Nightwood Editions, 2008) and Miraculous Hours (Nightwood Editions, 2005), which was a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. His poems, stories and non-fiction have appeared in The Walrus, Prism International, The Fiddlehead, The Journey Prize Anthology, Breathing Fire 2 and other publications across North America, Australia and Europe, and have been nominated for numerous awards including the Journey Prize and Pushcart Prize. He currently works in the Department of Creative Studies at the University of British Columbia Okanagan. His website is www.mattrader.com.