The Word Grandma

James Joyce’s The Dubliners tells tales of loss of love and failure to love. Two stories from the 1914 collection, The Dead and A Painful Case, explore the loss and failure of love but also the failure of language and literacy. It is a supreme irony that the world’s master of language should be so sensitive to the ways in which language and literacy fail.

In A Painful Case, James Duffy, a literate loner with “neither companions nor friends, church nor creed,” meets a married woman and engages her in a friendship. When she “caught up his hand passionately and pressed it to her cheek,” Duffy breaks off the relationship. Five years later he hears of her decline into drunkenness and suicide when she steps in front of a train. His epiphany comes when he realizes that “he had been outcast from life’s feast” and is alone.

In The Dead, Gabriel Conroy and his wife attend a holiday gathering. As they leave his wife hears a tenor singing an Irish song that brings memories of a young man, Michael Furey, who died many years ago. Gabriel is so wrapped up in his own desire and ego that he fails to notice Greta’s revery till they return to their hotel room and she tells the story of the sickly young man who stood outside the gate the night before she left for the convent school and died as a result. Gabriel finally realizes that he has never known such love for any woman.

Duffy and Gabriel are literate men. Duffy owns a wall of bookshelves that “were arranged from below upwards according to bulk.” He owns Wordsworth, the Maynooth Catechism, Hauptmann’s Michael Kramer, Nietzche, and he likes Mozart. His friendship with Mrs. Sincoe is a literate one: “…he entangled his thoughts with her.. He lent her books, provided her with ideas, shared his intellectual life with her.” Unlike Gabriel, however, he doesn’t write. When Mrs. Sincoe asks him “why he didn’t write out his thoughts,” he answers, “For what…  with careful scorn. To compete with phrasemongers, incapable of thinking consecutively for sixty seconds? To subject himself to the criticisms of an obtuse middle class which entrusted its morality to policemen and fine arts to impresarios?”

When he does write for himself, he uses the third person: he is alienated from his own soul as from the rest of the world. After he breaks with Mrs. Sincoe, he writes, “Love between man and man is impossible because there must be sexual intercourse and friendship between man and woman is impossible because there must be sexual intercourse.” So there can be neither love nor friendship for James Duffy. Duffy’s intellect doesn’t help him to tolerate or understand other people – he fails to communicate despite his literacy. “We cannot give ourselves…we are our own…every bond…is a bond to sorrow.”

Even after the death of Mrs. Sincoe, it takes a long while before he admits to himself that “he withheld life from her,” that he’d “sentenced her to death.” His literacy, his culture, his books, Mozart, even the love of a fine woman could not save him. “His life would be lonely…until he died, ceased to exist, became a memory – if anyone remembered him.”

In The Dead, Gabriel is not only literate: he has a degree from the Royal University. He “loved to feel the covers and turn the pages of newly printed books. Nearly every day… he used to wander down the quays to the second hand booksellers…” He writes professionally and orates at the family gathering.

But, despite his literacy, Gabriel repeatedly fails to read his environment. He “could not listen” to the music at the party. He engages in a verbal duel with his old friend, Miss Ivors, when she jokingly suggests that he’s a West Briton rather than an Irishman. He’s too distracted to listen to what old Mrs. Malins tells him and ignores his wife’s enthusiasm about a trip to Ireland.

Gabriel perverts language as a tool of human communication. As he enters the party, he’s already concerned about his speech, although he disdains his audience. “He was undecided about the lines from robert Browning because he feared they would be over the heads of his hearers…their grade of culture differed from his. He would only make himself ridiculous by quoting poetry to them which they could not understand…He would fail with them…His whole speech was a mistake from first to last, an utter failure.

He plans to use the speech as a way of getting back at Miss Ivors, even if it means lying about his aunts. “What did he care that his aunts were only two ignorant old women?”

Gabriel fails to communicate with his own children: “He’s an awful bother, what with green shades for Tom’s eyes at night and making him do the dumb-bells, and forcing Eva to eat the stirabout. The poor child!”

Gabriel uses his gift of language to distance himself from his own people as well. he writes a literary column for The Daily Express, apparently an English versus Irish publication, and he strives to travel to the continent “to keep in touch with the languages.”

Gabriel’s epiphany comes long after the gathering ends. As he and Gretta are leaving, she lingers on the stairs listening to the tenor sing an old Irish song. Then he misreads Gretta’s changed attitude. “She…seemed unaware of the talk about her…and Gabriel saw that there was colour on her cheeks and that her eyes were shining. A sudden tide of joy went leaping out of his heart.” He’s aroused to passion, thinking of “moments of their secret life together.” But he fails to speak the words he thinks: “He longed to recall to her those moments to make her forget the years of their dull existence together and remember only their moments of ecstasy.” Roused to passion, Gabriel doesn’t notice Gretta’s revery and, instead of speaking words of love to her, he tells her about a debt repaid by Freddy Malins. She then tells the story of Michael Furey, the delicate boy who died for her sake. Finally, Gabriel sees himself for what he is: “a ludicrous figure…a nervous well-meaning sentimentalist, orating to the vulgarians and idealizing his own clownish lusts, the  pitiable fatuous fellow he had caught a glimpse of in the mirror.”

As Gretta sleeps, Gabriel understands that “…she had had that romance in her life: a man had died for her sake.” He thinks about the impending deaths of them all, all except Michael Furey, and realizes, “Better pass boldly into that other world in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.” And he knows, “He had never felt that himself towards any woman but he knew that such a feeling must be love…His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead.” But communication fails him once more: “He was conscious of but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence.” Gabriel, whose language failed to enlighten him, now must face the final silence.

Martin Luther King Jr.’s voice has been stilled for too long, yet his ideas live on in the multitudes of ages, races and religions who took to the streets, peacefully acting together in revulsion against the murder of George Floyd.  King (as well as the nonviolent warriors we lost this month: Congressman John Lewis, Professor Lucius Barker, and Reverend C.T. Vivian) taught America the philosophy and discipline to resist peacefully.  By both changing the laws and speaking truth to power, American nonviolent resistance radically changed the lives of millions of people of color. We must resurrect these voices to light our way to reconciliation and peace not only for ourselves but for the broken world.

“This is the great new problem of mankind. We have inherited … a great ‘world house’ in which we have to live together – black and white, Easterner and Westerner, Gentile and Jew, Catholic and Protestant, Muslim and Hindu… Because we can never again live apart, we must learn somehow to live with each other in peace.”

King’s nonviolence brings love for all humanity; it channels rage into loving action; it shuns physical violence ; it embraces all faiths and colors; it holds a clear moral position; it excludes no one from love; it seeks the end all decent people seek: “the end is redemption, the end is reconciliation, the end is the creation of the beloved community.”

No one can say what he would have thought of this summer’s demonstrations except through his own words: I think he would have smiled at some aspects and wept at others. 

He’d have smiled:

At the beloved communities of peaceful protestors, who came to mourn together with anger and love. 

“It is this spirit and this type of love that can transform opposers into friends.”

“The end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience. And that will be a day not of the white man, not of the black man. That will be  the day of man as man.”

“Nonviolent resistance is a courageous confrontation of evil by the power of love.”

And Martin Luther King Jr. would have wept:

For what we’ve lost, forgotten, never learned, or erased in the half century since the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. 

For the burners, who torch shops, schools, police stations.

For the destroyers, who deface and shatter statues.

“…it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends.”

For those who attacked schools and houses of worship and sold their own souls for a moment of revenge. 

“…the aftermath of violence is tragic bitterness.”

For the well dressed young man walking off with a 65” tv in downtown Washington, having bought into the worst materialism of our time but not the civic duty that binds us together. 

For the attorneys who firebombed a police car in New York, only to have their lawyer suggest that their sentences should be cut because “no harm was done.”

“The way of violence leads to bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers..”

For the spray painters who diminish themselves through death wishes and curses. 

For the nihilists who have decided that their goals can be achieved only through chaos, not love. 

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”

Martin Luther King III and older King partners interviewed for the Times June 26 issue speak of their sadness at the acts of violence, looting, arson, and defacement of statues: “…we…were demonstrating…the power of nonviolence… you don’t write people off as the enemy…When you enter a confrontation, it is with an intention to move to reconciliation.” – “deeply dismayed by the initial outbreak of violence…” These voices of peace, unity, and reconciliation mirror the voices of the Floyd family and must be heard in the conversation on how to end historic systemic racism in America. 

When we see protestors kneel together, walk arm in arm, share water with police and each other, sing together, pray together, demand action, we see King’s vision. When we see the looters, arsonists, destroyers, and marchers who spout hate, we see a small dark but influential voice that masquerades as the voice of the people. 

Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered, his colleagues are dying off, but their philosophy and discipline remain and must return to our cultural conversation. The substance and methods of peaceful resistance endure; indeed, they offer hope for revival of our American spirit and unity.

“The aftermath of nonviolence is the creation of the beloved community, so that when the battle is over, a new relationship comes into being between the oppressed and the oppressor..”

So there I was, unpacking mementos of my 76 years as an unsentimental minimalist, when I happened upon a tiny coin-mounted silver llama which has traveled with me for six decades, mostly tucked away in kitchen drawers. In Scott Fitzgerald’s words, I was “borne back …into the past” and stopped polishing the silver to think about when H entered my eighteen year old sheltered and ordinary Brooklyn life.  A richness of long forgotten yet well remembered detail brought me back to that meeting and its joyous aftermath.

How did the path of a young Brooklyn College student link to that of an Argentine marquis studying at NYU’s Institute for Latin American Studies? Even that’s a story: my dearly beloved best friend “sister” Gioia went to NYU and, when I came to spend the weekend, we were set to meet her then boyfriend at the Catholic Students Lounge. There we met H and his Latin American coterie (it was the friend from Peru who gave me the llama) and went to one of the famed Village cafes. Somehow H and I connected and he introduced me to one of his (many) charming ways: he taught me to link arms with him as we sipped our wine. That was enough: I was smitten!

His group of friends befriended me and we attended NYU parties and drove to the cafes on Sheepshead Bay while  H and I enjoyed a lighthearted and (we both knew) ephemeral romance. He was the first (only?) man who serenaded me with gaucho love songs; he wove stories about how if he and Peron met in the street only one would live; he told of the day he was speeding around a dangerous curve on his motorcycle and the Virgin Mary saved his life (Jewish girls from Brooklyn do not marry men who were rescued by the Virgin Mary); he described the  paintings in his parents’ home. And when my birthday (I think it was my nineteenth because I’d met Marvin before my 20th) arrived, he gave me a gold charm engraved with my initials; when I asked why he didn’t sign his name he said that my husband would not be pleased to see such a gift from another man. If he ever did an  unkind deed or hurt my feelings, I don’t recall – I don’t think he did.

I don’t remember how it ended but it wasn’t hurtful for either of us: my dear husband of 53 years entered my life soon after that birthday and I lost touch with H and his friends (they may have returned to their home countries after I was given the little llama).

Each person we care about transforms us in some way: Dashing H showed me the prospect of a bigger world, of a life of romance, of the possibility of playing one’s days out on a larger stage. For this I will always be grateful.

The charm and little silver llama remained with me for all these years, as has the memory of this happy time.