A Very Irish Christmas

by James Joyce

  —O, at Christmas, when he opened that little Christmas-card shop in Henry Street.

  He was in such a fever of rage and desire that he did not hear her come from the window. She stood before him for an instant, looking at him strangely. Then, suddenly raising herself on tiptoe and resting her hands lightly on his shoulders, she kissed him.

  —You are a very generous person, Gabriel, she said.

  Gabriel, trembling with delight at her sudden kiss and at the quaintness of her phrase, put his hands on her hair and began smoothing it back, scarcely touching it with his fingers. The washing had made it fine and brilliant. His heart was brimming over with happiness. Just when he was wishing for it she had come to him of her own accord. Perhaps her thoughts had been running with his. Perhaps she had felt the impetuous desire that was in him, and then the yielding mood had come upon her. Now that she had fallen to him so easily, he wondered why he had been so diffident.

  He stood, holding her head between his hands. Then, slipping one arm swiftly about her body and drawing her towards him, he said softly:

  —Gretta, dear, what are you thinking about?

  She did not answer nor yield wholly to his arm. He said again, softly:

  —Tell me what it is, Gretta. I think I know what is the matter. Do I know?

  She did not answer at once. Then she said in an outburst of tears:

  —O, I am thinking about that song, “The Lass of Aughrim.”

  She broke loose from him and ran to the bed and, throwing her arms across the bed-rail, hid her face. Gabriel stood stock-still for a moment in astonishment and then followed her. As he passed in the way of the cheval glass he caught sight of himself in full length, his broad, well-filled shirt front, the face whose expression always puzzled him when he saw it in a mirror, and his glimmering gilt-rimmed eyeglasses. He halted a few paces from her and said:

  —What about the song? Why does that make you cry?

  She raised her head from her arms and dried her eyes with the back of her hand like a child. A kinder note than he had intended went into his voice.

  —Why, Gretta? he asked.

  —I am thinking about a person long ago who used to sing that song.

  —And who was the person long ago? asked Gabriel, smiling.

  —It was a person I used to know in Galway when I was living with my grandmother, she said.

  The smile passed away from Gabriel’s face. A dull anger began to gather again at the back of his mind and the dull fires of his lust began to glow angrily in his veins.

  —Someone you were in love with? he asked ironically.

  —It was a young boy I used to know, she answered, named Michael Furey. He used to sing that song, “The Lass of Aughrim.” He was very delicate.

  Gabriel was silent. He did not wish her to think that he was interested in this delicate boy.

  —I can see him so plainly, she said, after a moment. Such eyes as he had: big, dark eyes! And such an expression in them—an expression!

  —O, then, you are in love with him? said Gabriel.

  —I used to go out walking with him, she said, when I was in Galway.

  A thought flew across Gabriel’s mind.

  —Perhaps that was why you wanted to go to Galway with that Ivors girl? he said coldly.

  She looked at him and asked in surprise:

  —What for?

  Her eyes made Gabriel feel awkward. He shrugged his shoulders and said:

  —How do I know? To see him, perhaps.

  She looked away from him along the shaft of light towards the window in silence.

  —He is dead, she said at length. He died when he was only seventeen. Isn’t it a terrible thing to die so young as that?

  —What was he? asked Gabriel, still ironically.

  —He was in the gasworks, she said.

  Gabriel felt humiliated by the failure of his irony and by the evocation of this figure from the dead, a boy in the gasworks. While he had been full of memories of their secret life together, full of tenderness and joy and desire, she had been comparing him in her mind with another. A shameful consciousness of his own person assailed him. He saw himself as a ludicrous figure, acting as a pennyboy for his aunts, a nervous, well-meaning sentimentalist, orating to vulgarians and idealising his own clownish lusts, the pitiable fatuous fellow he had caught a glimpse of in the mirror. Instinctively he turned his back more to the light lest she might see the shame that burned upon his forehead.

  He tried to keep up his tone of cold interrogation, but his voice when he spoke was humble and indifferent.

  —I suppose you were in love with this Michael Furey, Gretta, he said.

  —I was great with him at that time, she said.

  Her voice was veiled and sad. Gabriel, feeling now how vain it would be to try to lead her whither he had purposed, caressed one of her hands and said, also sadly:

  —And what did he die of so young, Gretta? Consumption, was it?

  —I think he died for me, she answered.

  A vague terror seized Gabriel at this answer, as if, at that hour when he had hoped to triumph, some impalpable and vindictive being was coming against him, gathering forces against him in its vague world. But he shook himself free of it with an effort of reason and continued to caress her hand. He did not question her again, for he felt that she would tell him of herself. Her hand was warm and moist: it did not respond to his touch, but he continued to caress it just as he had caressed her first letter to him that spring morning.

  —It was in the winter, she said, about the beginning of the winter when I was going to leave my grandmother’s and come up here to the convent. And he was ill at the time in his lodgings in Galway and wouldn’t be let out, and his people in Oughterard were written to. He was in decline, they said, or something like that. I never knew rightly.

  She paused for a moment and sighed.

  —Poor fellow, she said. He was very fond of me and he was such a gentle boy. We used to go out together, walking, you know, Gabriel, like the way they do in the country. He was going to study singing only for his health. He had a very good voice, poor Michael Furey.

  —Well; and then? asked Gabriel.

  —And then when it came to the time for me to leave Galway and come up to the convent he was much worse and I wouldn’t be let see him so I wrote him a letter saying I was going up to Dublin and would be back in the summer, and hoping he would be better then.

  She paused for a moment to get her voice under control, and then went on:

  —Then the night before I left, I was in my grandmother’s house in Nuns’ Island, packing up, and I heard gravel thrown up against the window. The window was so wet I couldn’t see, so I ran downstairs as I was and slipped out the back into the garden and there was the poor fellow at the end of the garden, shivering.

  —And did you not tell him to go back? asked Gabriel.

  —I implored of him to go home at once and told him he would get his death in the rain. But he said he did not want to live. I can see his eyes as well as well! He was standing at the end of the wall where there was a tree.

  —And did he go home? asked Gabriel.

  —Yes, he went home. And when I was only a week in the convent he died and he was buried in Oughterard, where his people came from. O, the day I heard that, that he was dead!

  She stopped, choking with sobs, and, overcome by emotion, flung herself face downward on the bed, sobbing in the quilt. Gabriel held her hand for a moment longer, irresolutely, and then, shy of intruding on her grief, let it fall gently and walked quietly to the window.

  She was fast asleep.

  Gabriel, leaning on his elbow, looked for a few moments unresentfully on her tangled hair and half-open mouth, listening to her deep-drawn breath. So she had had that romance in her life: a man had died for her sake. It hardly pained him now to think how poor a part he, her husband, had played in her life. He watched her while she slept, as though he and she had never lived together as man and wife. His cu
rious eyes rested long upon her face and on her hair: and, as he thought of what she must have been then, in that time of her first girlish beauty, a strange, friendly pity for her entered his soul. He did not like to say even to himself that her face was no longer beautiful, but he knew that it was no longer the face for which Michael Furey had braved death.

  Perhaps she had not told him all the story. His eyes moved to the chair over which she had thrown some of her clothes. A petticoat string dangled to the floor. One boot stood upright, its limp upper fallen down: the fellow of it lay upon its side. He wondered at his riot of emotions of an hour before. From what had it proceeded? From his aunt’s supper, from his own foolish speech, from the wine and dancing, the merrymaking when saying good-night in the hall, the pleasure of the walk along the river in the snow. Poor Aunt Julia! She, too, would soon be a shade with the shade of Patrick Morkan and his horse. He had caught that haggard look upon her face for a moment when she was singing “Arrayed for the Bridal.” Soon, perhaps, he would be sitting in that same drawing room, dressed in black, his silk hat on his knees. The blinds would be drawn down and Aunt Kate would be sitting beside him, crying and blowing her nose and telling him how Julia had died. He would cast about in his mind for some words that might console her, and would find only lame and useless ones. Yes, yes: that would happen very soon.

  The air of the room chilled his shoulders. He stretched himself cautiously along under the sheets and lay down beside his wife. One by one, they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover’s eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live.

  Generous tears filled Gabriel’s eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling.

  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.

  ELIZABETH BOWEN (1899–1973) was the author of ten novels and eight collections of short stories, the genre in which she felt most comfortable. Bowen’s tragic childhood brought her from Ireland to Hythe, England, where she stayed for most of her life. She regularly traveled between the two islands, reporting on wartime Ireland for the Ministry of Information and visiting her ancestral home in County Cork, the history of which she described in her first nonfiction book, Bowen’s Court.

  FRANCES BROWNE (1816–1879) was known as the “Blind Poetess of Donegal,” having lost her sight as a result of smallpox as an infant. She is best remembered for her widely-translated 1856 collection of children’s stories, Granny’s Wonderful Chair and the Stories It Told, but also published short stories, poems, and an autobiography, My Share of the World, in 1862.

  ANNE ENRIGHT (1962– ) has published seven novels and three short-story collections, along with one nonfiction book, Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood (2004). Before focusing on writing she was a producer and director on the groundbreaking Irish television series Nighthawks. Enright’s novel The Gathering won the 2007 Booker Prize, and she was named the inaugural Laureate for Irish Fiction in 2015.

  JAMES JOYCE (1882–1941) became one of the most influential authors of the twentieth century with just four books of fiction, including the modernist masterpiece Ulysses (1922), along with two poetry collections and a play, Exiles (1918). Joyce’s early life, described in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), sunk rapidly from luxury to relative squalor. Though he left Dublin in 1902 for a series of European cities, only returning three times between 1904 and 1912, his fiction was never set anywhere else.

  CLAIRE KEEGAN (1968– ) is a short story writer and creative writing teacher. Her debut collection, Antarctica, won the inaugural William Trevor Prize, and her story “Foster” won the prestigious Davy Byrnes Award, selected by American novelist Richard Ford. Keegan has taught at Villanova University, Trinity College Dublin, and Pembroke College Cambridge.

  BERNARD MacLAVERTY (1942– ) is a northern Irish novelist and short story writer. After ten years as a medical laboratory technician in Belfast, he studied at Queen’s University Belfast and then moved with his family to Scotland, where he still lives. He has published five novels, two of which—Cal (1983) and Lamb (1980)—he adapted for the screen. He has also published five books of short stories, television and radio plays, and children’s books.

  AISLING MAGUIRE (1958– ) earned a PhD from the National University of Ireland in Dublin with a thesis on the poetry of Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney. She has written two novels; contributed short stories, book reviews, and features to a variety of anthologies, Irish and international publications, and RTÉ 1; and previously worked as a parliamentary reporter in the Houses of the Oireachtas.

  MÁIRE MHAC a tSAOI (1922– ) is an Irish-language poet who spent her childhood between Dublin and the Irish-speaking region of Kerry, before studying at University College Dublin and the Sorbonne. She has published several volumes of Irish-language poetry, as well as critical essays and a nonfiction book, Concise History of Ireland (1972), written with her husband, Conor Cruise O’Brien.

  KATHERINE FRANCES (K. F.) PURDON (1852–1918) was a novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet from County Meath. Her fiction is written mostly in a Hiberno-English dialect. She was connected to the Irish Revival movement, with her writing often illustrated by Jack B. Yeats, and her story “Candle and Crib” performed as a play at the Abbey Theatre in 1918. She was a founding member of the United Irishwomen, now known as the Irish Countrywomen’s Association.

  PATRICK AUGUSTINE (CANON) SHEEHAN (1852–1913) was born in County Cork and became parish priest of Doneraile, County Cork, in 1894. As a priest, he began writing novels, essays, and poems, alongside his sermons. All of his writing was part of the same project of preserving traditional Catholic values in response to rapid modernization in Ireland. He published ten novels in his lifetime, as well as the 1905 collection A Spoiled Priest and Other Stories, and a posthumous collection of his poetry was published in 1921.

  COLM TÓIBÍN (1955– ) is an award-winning novelist, short story writer, and journalist from Enniscorthy, County Wexford. He was educated at University College Dublin and has taught creative writing and literature at such institutions as Stanford University, Princeton University, and the University of Manchester. The film adaptation of his 2009 novel Brooklyn was nominated for Best Picture at the 2015 Academy Awards.

  WILLIAM TREVOR (1928–2016) began his career as a sculptor and art teacher in Northern Ireland and England, but became a full-time writer at the age of thirty-six, after the critical success of his second novel, The Old Boys (1964). Throughout his life he published a total of twenty novels and almost one hundred stories, for which he was especially acclaimed, with critics highlighti
ng his straightforward style and attention to the everyday.

  THE WEXFORD or ENNISCORTHY CAROL is one of thirteen carols from the Kilmore Carols, a cycle of carols from south county Wexford. It was passed down orally, though probably for only a few centuries, before being transcribed by William Henry Grattan Flood in the 1928 Oxford Book of Carols. Wexford was one of the few historically English-speaking counties in Ireland, and “The Wexford Carol” was written originally in English, though it has been translated into Irish.

  WILLIAM BUTLER (W. B.) YEATS (1865–1939) was a central force behind the Irish Revival in literature as the founder of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. He was a significant dramatist, but is best known for his poems, such as “The Second Coming” and “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” which are among the most beloved and respected in Irish literature. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923, the first of four Irish laureates.

  A VERY GERMAN CHRISTMAS

  This collection brings together traditional and contemporary holiday stories from Austria, Switzerland and Germany. You’ll find classic works by the Brothers Grimm, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Heinrich Heine, Thomas Mann, Rainer Maria Rilke, Hermann Hesse, Joseph Roth and Arthur Schnitzler, as well as more recent tales by writers like Heinrich Böll, Peter Stamm and Martin Suter.

  https://newvesselpress.com/books/a-very-german-christmas/

  A VERY SCANDINAVIAN CHRISTMAS

  The best Scandinavian holiday stories including classics by Hans Christian Andersen, Nobel Prize winner Selma Lagerlöf, August Strindberg as well as popular Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard. These Nordic tales—coming from the very region where much traditional Christmas imagery originates—convey a festive spirit laden with lingonberries, elks, gnomes and aquavit in abundance. A smorgasbord of unexpected literary gifts sure to provide plenty of pleasure and hygge, that specifically Scandinavian blend of coziness and contentment.

  https://newvesselpress.com/books/a-very-scandinavian-christmas/