James Joyce, "The Boarding House"

cleaver blades & the subtle disappointment of palaces

“From her hands and wrists too as she lit and steadied her candle a faint perfume arose.”

You’re a child playing in a creek, sifting through pebbles, letting the water run over your fingers. Something on the creek-bed flashes in the sunlight — an earring? A fish scale? A discarded sequin? No. It’s gold! An actual piece of gold.

The next day you return with a town’s worth of grownups and they confirm your discovery. And it wasn’t just that piece of gold. Your bit turns out to have been merely a crumb from a feast — there’s an unfathomable amount of gold beneath this humble creek, and soon enough it’s all been professionally extracted and purified and melted and there’s so much of it that the town elders decree that, in recognition of your contribution, they will knock down your family’s drafty creek-side shack and replace it with a golden palace. Golden banisters, golden bunkbeds, golden light fixtures. You will live the rest of your life in splendor. You wear special gold-framed sunglasses, to address the constant glare. You are obscenely, imperially rich.

Which is why it strikes you as odd that often, when you’ve managed to fall asleep on your golden mattress (which is not in fact so comfortable), your happiest dreams are of that long-since-flattened shack. You were richer, you sometimes senselessly feel, when you were clutching that golden pebble in your freezing bed than you are here warm in your golden pajamas in the palace. But this is madness. You shake off your ingratitude and go down to enjoy your gold-dusted eggs on your golden flatware. 

In college I spent a long semester wandering through the golden palaces of James Joyce’s Great Books. And they really are — Ulysses in particular is — great. Intricately structured, wildly various in style, virtuosic on almost every page. And yet: when the course was done I closed Ulysses with relief, and I have barely returned to it since. Its greatness is almost indigestibly over-apparent, its demonstration of genius so punishingly thorough that you put up your hands in sheepish surrender. The book of Joyce’s that I actually do find myself sliding from the shelf is the one that in the course we treated as a regrettably pedestrian preamble.

Joyce published Dubliners — his first collection of stories — when he was living in Trieste, working as an English tutor. Its stories are realistic, modest in scale, immediately apprehensible. And they feature glints of gold — discreet moments of heart-stilling promise — that are to me more compelling than that promise’s extravagant realization.  

My favorite story in the book, or anyway the one that I’ve been rereading with the most pleasure lately, is “The Boarding House.” It’s about a woman named Mrs. Mooney, a butcher’s daughter who deals with life’s problems “as a cleaver deals with meat.” Her husband becomes a drunk so she throws him out. She needs money, so she sets up a boarding house. The writing has a butcher-paper plainness.

She was a woman who was quite able to keep things to herself: a determined woman.   

Notice the colon landing in the middle of the sentence like a cleaver’s blade. Joyce imbues the story with Mrs. Mooney’s Soup Nazi-ish haste. You take your parcel of meaning and you move along.

But Mrs. Mooney doesn’t get to inhabit the story (or her house) alone. Her daughter Polly lives with her:

… a slim girl of nineteen; she had light soft hair and a full mouth. Her eyes, which were gray with a shade of green through them, had a habit of glancing upward when she spoke with anyone…  

And Polly has gotten herself into trouble with one of the young men in the boarding house (“something was going on,” as Joyce discreetly puts it). Polly is pregnant.

And the man who impregnated her, Mr. Doran, is in quite a state.

He had made two attempts to shave but his hand had been so unsteady that he had been obliged to desist. Three days’ reddish beard fringed his jaws and every two or three minutes a mist gathered on his glasses so that he had to take them off and polish them with his pocket-handkerchief.  

The prose takes on a bit of Mr. Doran’s jitteriness. The physical details — that compulsive glasses-polishing — are nicely chosen. We’re in professional hands. If you were, at this point, to tell me that I was reading a story by W. Somerset Maugham, I would think nothing of it (except perhaps: I guess Maugham lived in Ireland for a bit?).

But then Mr. Doran starts to remember the night that his and Polly’s affair began. 

It was not altogether his fault that it had happened. He remembered well… the first casual caresses her dress, her breath, her fingers had given him.

In a story that has so far been as sensual as a refrigerator case, Joyce has switched on Barry White. Mr. Doran remembers the night that Polly, claiming that she needed to relight her candle (“hers had been blown out by a gust”), appeared at his door. She was dressed for bed. Joyce allows his prose to get discreetly worked up (“Her white instep shone in the opening of her furry slippers and the blood glowed warmly behind her perfumed skin.”)

And then he writes this:

From her hands and wrists too as she lit and steadied her candle a faint perfume arose.

And W. Somerset Maugham has left the building. 

Because Joyce has here created a string of linguistic candle-smoke. The standard and dull way to write the sentence would have been: 

A faint perfume arose from her hands and wrists as she lit and steadied the candle.

Step 1 (A faint perfume arose), Step 2 (from her hands and wrists), Step 3 (as she lit and steadied the candle). But Joyce allows the clauses to weave weightlessly out of order (2,3,1). He sends them twisting up into the darkness of Mr. Doran’s bedroom without even the weight of a comma.

And the reader — remembering that Joyce was in his twenties when he wrote this — glimpses gold. What a rare and quiet delight is this moment before the prospectors and professors come storming in.