Book #7: Bloomsbury Blues

“For they might be parted for hundreds of years, she and Peter; she never wrote a letter and his were dry as sticks; but suddenly it would come over her, If he were with me now what would he say?”

I put down Mrs. Dalloway and blew my nose.

My first boyfriend Josh reminded me of Peter Walsh, Mrs. Dalloway’s childhood sweetheart. There's something about the way Mrs. Dalloway never forgets “his eyes, his pocket-knife, his smile, his grumpiness and, when millions of things had utterly vanished – how strange it was! – a few sayings” that was all too familiar. Had Josh been a British gentleman, like Peter, he might have headed to India for the empire's last hurrah. They were eccentrics who loved their travels, sword collections and foreign women. Their larger than life personalities splashed into conversations at parties, made outrageous claims, got everyone riled up, started fights, and then, at the height of it all, slipped out the back door.

Years ago, when I was reading Mrs. Dalloway for the first time, I told Josh that he reminded me of Peter. He eagerly began reading it. But the depiction left him incensed. “You're mean. Is this your way of saying we're not going to end up together?”

Although I'd shook his comment off with an ironic toss of the head, the feeling was darker than irony. I had been mean - meanness was a way of controlling that manic mouse scaling the walls of my stomach.

I had wanted him to leave me. At the time, I thought it was so I could be alone with my own thoughts. That fragile, self-contained world of dead authors waxing lyrical on god knows what.

Now I had all the time in the world to read my shelf full of books, but was there any reason to get out of my pajamas in the morning?

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The Myth of the Joycean "Epiphany"

I stood outside the house where my father grew up, snapping pictures. A stout woman in a house dress came out and scowled. She swept the porch, practically beating it.

"I'm not a speculator," I said. I explained that my great-grandmother - "Granny Shimo," as everyone used to call her - had bought the house in the 1950s. The woman's face softened in recognition. Evidently, her father had told her about Mrs. Shimo driving a hard bargain.

The woman invited me in. Walking around inside, I found myself imagining my grandfather, Kaz, in various stages of decline. Staggering around the house, bumping into furniture. Passed out on the sofa, drunk and high. Bundled up in a rocking chair, catatonic and shaking, his face ashen. I felt like the boy in James Joyce's “The Sisters,” haunted by the ghostly memory of Father Flynn:

“I imagined that I saw again the heavy grey face of the paralytic. I drew the blankets over my head and tried to think of Christmas. But the grey face still followed me. It murmured and I understood that it desired to confess something. I felt my soul receding into some pleasant and vicious region and there again I found it waiting for me."

There's something moving about the crazy old priest, whose beliefs have fallen by the wayside. The “idle chalice” he clasps in his coffin – an eerie reminder of the chalice he broke shortly before his death – crystallizes the story’s central theme of mania and malaise at the centre of the church.

I wished that Kaz's life could be grasped according to some similar symbol or “epiphany.” Joyce is famous for creating these beautiful epiphanic moments where the ideas of his stories converge on their exact focus and the implications of all events become ironically clear.

But nothing came to mind as I peered into the dusty corners of the house. No flash of insight. My grandfather remained a blind spot, as always.

“Where did Kaz die after his stroke?” I asked my father later that evening. I was thinking of that cramped bedroom, the smooth white bedspread stretching out.

Daddy’s eyes twitched like he’d been given a shock. I watched his bewildered expression from the corner of my eye.

What wasn’t he telling me? Did he think I couldn’t handle the truth?


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