And The Dead Shall Live Again
Roberta Grey, The Sunday Tribune - 16^th November 2003

No 15 Usheršs Island, the sadly neglected setting for James Joycešs best-loved short story 'The Dead', will soon everberate with the sound of music and conversation, just as it did 100 years ago. And it's all thanks to one man's courage and tenacity, writes Roberta Gray.

When James Joyce wrote his masterpiece The Dead, he had a specific house firmly in mind for its setting. 15 Usher's Island, described by him as a 'dark, gaunt house', sitting on the south quays of the Liffey opposite Collins Barracks, was the house in which his two great-aunts lived, and which he had visited every Christmas as a young boy. A century later, the vision of the house has established itself in the public mind not only through Joyce's original description but also through the visual images captured by director John Huston and actors Donal McCann and Anjelica Huston in the eloquent 1987 screen version of the story.

One of the most accessible of all his works, Joyce's short story is haunted by death, culminating in the story of the ardent young lover Michael Furey and his death for the sake of love, and in Gabriel Conroy's vision of the snow 'falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.' In his moment of epiphany, Gabriel realises the mortality of all things, and that all the people who surrounded him at the vibrant party will soon become just shades in the past. A century after the story took place, the Georgian house in which it was set very nearly became just a shade too, a piece of Dublin's literary history left to moulder in obscurity.

David Norris, in welcoming the restoration project, describes it as one that required 'vision, courage, money, and the capacity to take risks.' Kilty is reluctant to discuss money, but as for the other three, he obviously has them in spades; and it is sheer optimism which has got him this far in the project. It has been a huge undertaking. One of the most obvious tasks was to rebuild the top storey and roof, while another major job was replacing the entire back wall of the building. Each individual brick had to be removed, stored, and replaced: the whole job took a year. It was a traumatic operation, and the house still bears the scars, most notably a huge crack which, while now plastered up, can still be seen running along the wall next to the stairs.

It first emerged as a hairline crack when the back wall was taken off, but within three weeks was several inches wide. Most people would be immediately alarmed by such an occurrence, but it's a mark of Kilty's calm optimism that he remained unruffled. 'The engineers were very comfortable with it and said it looked a lot worse than it was. It was wide enough to put your hand into, and I invited several people to do so, but they declined.' Whether this was because they feared having the weight of half a Georgian house fall on their hands or because the plaster used at the time was made out of a mixture of horse hair, goats hair, blood, urine and lime, he doesn't mention.

While replacing the entire back wall of the house and risking letting the building implode upon itself sounds like the most dramatic part of the project, it was in fact a much more mundane concern that caused the most anguish: the simple logistical difficulties of getting deliveries made to the house. As busy as the quays were in 1904, when Joyce described them in Ulysses, they're even more clogged up now, and with permission refused to erect a skip outside the building, everything that entered or left the building had to take a long and circuitous route. Together with security considerations, this caused a perennial headache. But there were pleasant surprises too: like when a brick wall was knocked down in the basement, only to reveal the original fireplace still intact, including pots and pans which dated back to around the time The Dead was written. Kilty also considers himself fortunate in that, while a lot of the original features of the house are missing, the fact that the Irish

Architectural Archive contains numerous photographs of the interior means that there's no information gap. Fireplaces and fanlights can be recast to the original designs, and the emphasis is on doing them authentically, regardless of how long it takes. The restoration project has been widely welcomed by those interested in James Joyce and in the short story and film that each so beautifully captured the atmosphere of 15 Ushers Island. Actress Rachael Dowling, who played the maid Lily, 'the caretaker's daughter (who) was literally run off her feet' in the film, describes visiting the house for the first time recently as like a homecoming. She already felt like she knew the house intimately, although she had never been in it before - the interior shots for the film were shot in a replica of the house in Hollywood, since at the time, John Huston was too ill to travel.

Helen Monaghan, director of the James Joyce Centre on North Great George's St and grand-niece of the writer, has also praised the project. 'Any work that helps to improve awareness of Joyce and his relationship to this city is a good thing, and I feel this has been a labour of love for Brendan Kilty. He's gone about this the right way: he's trying to save the building but also give it a purpose and put some life back into it.' Kilty has ambitious plans for the house, most notably that of hosting regular dinners in the dining room, based on the menu described in The Dead.

The ground floor will be a gallery space that will play host to anything from art exhibitions to poetry reading and book launches (it is currently exhibiting works by the artist Gary Daly) while the second floor - where the Misses Morkan presumably had their bedrooms - will be a bed and breakfast: the only Joyce house in which vistors can actually spend the night.

Perhaps most important of all is the new owner's determination to keep the spirit of music alive in the house. Like a haunting melody, music runs throughout The Dead, from the recitals that take place before dinner, to the conversation about opera around the dinner table (and the drunkard Freddie Malins' enthusiasm for the tenor in the Gaiety panto), and the heart-breaking moment when Gretta listens to the tenor Mr Bartell D'Arcy singing The Lass of Aughrim.

After a gap of almost century, the restoration of the house and the decision to open it up to the public means that the recitals can once again begin at 15 Usher's Island - but the singing won't be restricted just to formal events. 'It's amazing,' says Brendan Kilty, ' Whatever it is about the house, every time people come here, they inevitably end up singing by candlelight upstairs.' James Joyce and his aunts would no doubt have approved.

Next January, however, as the city gears up for an entire year of Joyce-related celebrations to mark the hundredth anniversary of Bloomsday, the house - whose front door practically opens onto Santiago Calatrava's spanking new James Joyce bridge - will once again be the site of a memorable party. On 6th January 2004, exactly one hundred years since the setting of The Dead, a group of scholars, actors, politicians and Joyce enthusiasts will sit around a table in the very dining room which provided the setting for the story, recreate the dinner described by Joyce, and no doubt breathe a long sigh of relief that the house has at last had its once-doubtful future assured.

Joyce himself never lived at Usher's Island, but had a strong connection with the property. His great aunts Mrs. Lyons and Mrs. Callanan, and Mrs. Callanan's daughter Mary Ellen (the inspiration for the story's Misses Morkan and Mary Jane) lived there, renting the first and second floors of the building from a seed merchant by the name of Mr Fagan (the story's Mr Fulham) who owned it. It was a house associated with music - the two aunts taught piano there - and Joyce, a talented singer, was a frequent visitor.

Every Christmas he was one of the guests at an annual party held by his great-aunts, at which his father would carve the goose and make a speech, just as Gabriel Conroy does in The Dead. No writer has been more closely associated with Dublin than James Joyce: to wander around the city is to be reminded, at every corner, of epiphanic moments and fleeting glimpses in his works, and the bricks and mortar of the city are intimately intertwined with the inner consciousness of his characters. Indeed, he once famously proclaimed that his intention in writing Ulysses was to provide a portrait of the city so accurate that, were Dublin to be suddenly wiped straight from the earth, it could be rebuilt from the descriptions in his book.

It's a claim much quoted and yet ironically, says Joycean expert Luke Gibbons, it is misleading. While the 'moral history' of his city which he spoke of might be strongly discernable from Joyce's work, architects would find it hard to glean from him any valuable information about the actually physical makeup of the city. 'Joyce doesn't go in for the long descriptive passages at all: it's all allusion, and he presupposes that people know what the buildings and the streets look like. One of the most distinctive features of his writing is that the greater the eloquence and virtuosity of the language, ironically, the more the meaning is off the page, because it's always pointing to sites and memories and locations that you have to see for yourself. Unless you know the topography, the language is dead on the page.'

It is for this reason, feels Gibbons, that it is especially important that the buildings and locations associated with Joyce are preserved. All too often has not happened, as was the case with the house at no. 2 Millbourne Avenue, Drumcondra, where Joyce lived as a young man, and which is described in A Portrait of the Artist. It was illegally demolished in 1998, despite being a listed property. 'It's almost a defacing of Joyce's own writing,' says Gibbons of such acts, 'because his writing constantly points to the real world outside the page. To take away that is to deface the writing itself.'

Ironically, it was the demolition of No 2 Millbourne avenue which indirectly led to the restoration of 15 Usher's Island, a project undertaken by a Joycean enthusiast, barrister Brendan Kilty, when he purchased the house from property developer Terry Devey in 2000.

Kilty describes himself as 'a structural Joycean', rather than a Joycean scholar, for whom a life-long enthusiasm for the writer has been a 'bottom-up' interest rather than a book-learning one. The city of Dublin is his first love, and it was as a student in the early 1980s, first at Bolton Street and then at Trinity, that he first started exploring the city, varying his route on the way to college to make it as interesting as possible, and passing by the numerous buildings associated with Joyce.

In November 1998, when he heard of the destruction of Joyce's childhood home on Millbourne Avenue, the first thing Brendan Kilty did was to go straight to the site, where he expected a protest to be taking place. All he found, however, was a fleet of trucks removing the rubble. 'It struck me that as wrong that the city that was supposed to be protecting this listed building should instead be accepting the rubble into its dump, so somewhat impetuously I moved in and bought eighteen truckloads of the rubble. It couldn't be salvaged for building purposes and I had no idea what I was going to do with it - the only decision was to stop it being dumped. It was a case of, as Mr Micawber says in Dickens, something will turn up.'

Something did turn up. Inspired by a suggestion by the Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, that he build a seat dedicated to Joyce in Griffith Park opposite the house, Kilty hatched a more ambitious plan: to use the rubble to build sixty-three James Joyce seats in locations around the world. The first seat has already been built in Kuala Lumpur, while plans have already been approved for seats in fifteen other locations (Kilty, a man who is as fond of the symbolic as Joyce himself was, won't at present divulge what the significance of the number 63 is).

It was that spur-of-the-moment action, says Kilty, which established his credentials as someone who wanted to preserve Dublin's Joycean heritage, and led to Terry Devey selling him the house at 15 Usher's Island in 2000, in the knowledge that he would be committed to restoring it.

It was no small undertaking: history had not been kind to the house. It may have been the setting for what is now regarded as one of the best short stories ever written, but for years its significance had gone unnoticed, until Senator David Norris identified it as the setting for The Dead some thirty-five years ago.

At the time, it was still home to a seed merchant on the ground floor, while the upper storeys were, as in Joyce's time, rented out as private accommodation. By the 1980s, however, its residents had started to vacate the building, and the rooms immortalised by Joyce lay empty. The house was earmarked for demolition as part of a development plan to widen large sections of the quays and to build a bridge across the Liffey, but saved as a result, in part, of a major campaign by An Taisce.

In 1991, 15 Usher's Island was acquired by property developer Terry Devey. As part of the planning permission for a block of apartments beside and behind the house, it was stipulated that the house should be restored to its original state - and yet by 2000, when it was sold on, it had simply been left to degenerate.

When Brendan Kilty bought the property, it was in a battered and sorry shape. During the 1970s, the top floor of the house had actually been taken off and the pitched roof replaced with corrugated metal - a common practice in Georgian buildings where the expense of maintaining the roof and heating the house made it more economical simply to lop off the offending floor. 'The 'dark, gaunt house' actually looked rather squat at that time without its fourth floor,' recalls David Norris. 'It was in a ghastly state.'

During the years in which the house lay derelict, it was occupied by squatters: when Kilty moved in, two bucketsful of used syringes were taken out, as well as babies' nappies and several tonnes of rubbish. There was evidence of fires being lit, with smoke damage spread all along several walls. And over the years - nobody is too sure exactly how or when - the house had been stripped bare of practically all of its distinguishing architectural features.

In the dining room and drawing room - the two main rooms in which The Dead is set - the original fireplaces were ripped out, leaving two dark, gaping holes in the walls. The impressive fanlight above the front door, of a distinctive design which incorporated a lantern, was removed. So too was the the stained glass from the large window on the landing, where Gretta, in the story, stood listening to the Lass of Aughrim. Skirting boards and dado rails disappeared, as did the ceiling mouldings in all rooms but two.

It was lucky for the house that it was bought by someone with an optimistic mindset, who was not for one moment put off by its degraded state. 'It would be easy, with hindsight, to say that I saw the potential, but that almost suggests a calculated decision, and that I knew what I was doing in a structured way, which would not be correct. I had it, and it was a case of now, let's take the next step.'

Three years on, the house is in its final phase of renovation, with the aim being to complete the project by January in time to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of The Dead. Despite not being a finished project, it is open to the public, so that people can witness the work in progress, and see just what goes into this type of restoration project. Indeed some of the visitors have in fact been a source of valuable information: a group of conservation technology students from Bolton street recently pointed out to Kilty that the building had its own original Georgian-era soundproofing system.

It's a fascinating work-in-progress to visit. Photocopied sheets blu-tacked the walls explain how the restoration has been carried out ('Directly beneath where you are now standing there are twelve piles going down over 21 feet deep below basement level'), point out the features visitors might recognise from the story or film ('This is where the ladies waited to see if Freddy was screwed or not.'), invite contributions ('Please tell us what colour you think the walls should be painted - and why?'), and appeal for help ('No. 15 Usher's Island had a most glorious fanlight and lamp. Do you know where it is? We would love to have it back.').

Walking around the house, one is struck by just what a mammoth task its restoration is, and how degraded a condition the house was left in. Chunks of plaster are missing from the walls. The doors to the drawing room and dining room have ugly metal sheets nailed to them and are covered in graffiti. Downstairs in the basement, one hundred years worth of electrical cables hang down from the ceiling in great swathes. Led by curiosity, one gingerly opens doors, only to narrowly avoid stepping into rooms with no floorboards.

But Kilty - who should know as thing or two about litigation, is not too worried. 'We haven't lost anyone yet,' he says cheerfully. 'No one's fallen through the floor or got food poisoning' (The house, in its unfinished state, has already played host to a 'Hard Hat Dinner' for visiting academics). Like a patient placed discreetly behind a screen, the unfinished house is at present covered by hoarding and by a huge shroud bearing a picture of Joyce; visitors are admitted by appointment only. The first time I see the house and meet project director Brendan Kilty, I don't quite believe it when she tells me the house is going to be transformed into an art gallery within two days' time. (Strictly speaking, it's actually my second time there: the first time, I arrive just as it's getting dark, and am welcomed into the house only for McIlraith to realise that the electricity is temporarily off.

Very Joycean, but a bit impractical: I decide to come back in the morning). Like the house's owner, McIlraith is a person of optimism and determination: there's not a shadow of a doubt in her voice as she assures me that everything will be ready for the house's first official event two days later. And sure enough, on the evening in question, the two reception rooms on the ground floor, where the seed merchant originally had his offices, have been transformed into a not-half-bad gallery space. Admittedly, the other rooms in the house look like a building site, and guests have to clamber down a makeshift staircase into the rather scary basement if they need to use the (equally makeshift and scary) bathroom. But, just as envisaged, the assembled guests are intrigued, rather than put off, by seeing the house in its unfinished state.

Š The Sunday Tribune