I have never believed that any person, any longing, any grief, or any moment is truly new. There is nothing under the sun we have not felt before. Scripture said this first, and said it most plainly: “That which hath been is that which shall be, and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 1:9). I did not arrive at this as a doctrine to be argued but as something I could not put down. I have spent a career of stories, poems, and two novels finding out how many ways it is true.
I write as a Transcendentalist, in sensibility if not always in doctrine. Emerson taught me to trust the inner light and to call the great current beneath every separate life the Oversoul. Thoreau taught me to look long and closely at the near and the small until they open onto something larger—so closely that the aphorism a boy reads underlined in a dead man’s book (“Goodness is the only investment that never fails”) can, a generation later, save a stolen chalice from staying stolen. Whitman taught me that a single life, honestly told, contains multitudes and belongs to everyone who reads it. I am in their debt, and I have never tried to hide it.
Hegel gives the same idea a different grammar. A thesis meets its antithesis; the two do not simply cancel one another but rise together into something neither could have been alone — sublated, in his word, which means canceled, preserved, and lifted up all at once. That is closer than “repetition” to what I mean when I say a scene, an image, or a grief returns in my work. It is not the same thing happening twice. It is the old thing and its opposite, meeting and carried forward, changed by the meeting. A theft becomes a return. A lie about leukemia becomes a real prayer said in the wrong pew. A ghost the world calls schizophrenia becomes, to the boy who sees it, an inheritance.
Einstein supplies the physics for what Emerson, Hegel, and Ecclesiastes already knew in their own registers: that the distinction between past, present, and future is, in his own words, only a stubbornly persistent illusion. I take this as more than metaphor. I believe, as a matter of both faith and craft, that we are who we were, who we are, and who we will be, all at once, whether or not we have the instruments to measure it. In these stories, Laura—Aiden’s mother—knows this without needing the physics: she has seen her own mother caught in a pine tree years before she was born, and she recognizes the future when it arrives because it never stopped being present. I call this conviction, plainly, resurrection — not only the doctrine I was raised on, but the working premise of everything I write. What is loved and what is written does not end. It goes quiet for a while, and it comes back, changed.
This is why the four stories in this book keep returning to the same rooms—why the reader will notice, and is meant to notice, certain scenes and images pass among them like family members moving from room to room. A grandmother who steals to protect the people she loves. A gold chalice taken from Mission Church and eventually returned to it. A cure sought in a psychiatric ward at McCall Hospital by way of a wine that ought not to be there. A blindfolded woman on a light-brown globe, playing a lyre with a single string, in a print called Hope—George Frederic Watts, 1886—that the mother has begun to copy in pencil. A star in the twilit sky above the hospital lawn, and, beneath it, a grandfather no one else can see. Yeats’s Innisfree, first as a poem pasted into a photo album and then as the boat in that album, and finally as a scarf caught on a branch—a small girl in a green pinafore, a small vision of a small girl in a green pinafore, one image folded inside the other. These recur across “Keep Calm and Carry On,” “The Wrong Way,” “Blindfolded,” and “Arise and Go Now” because I do not experience them as finished the first time I write them. They are simply where I return, the way a person returns to a family home long after the deed has changed hands. Read this way, the four stories in this book are, in one sense, one story told four times—from four angles, at four temperatures. A reader who resists that reading will still find four stories that, more strictly than most collections, share a family.
The same conviction sends me both outward and inward. My fiction keeps company, often quietly, with writers who taught me to see. Yeats gave the boy a title, “Arise and Go Now,” and the mother her private landscape at Innisfree. Dickens loans Aiden a language for his father—a man like the Ghost of Christmas Past, going the wrong way in a snowstorm and unable to admit it. Hawthorne turns up in Rita’s kitchen with a warning about human frailty and sorrow. The nineteenth-century Watts hangs on Laura’s bed as a picture and, later, on the lawn of a mental hospital as a person. Even the doctrine of the venial and the mortal sin, argued over eggs and bacon, is a borrowing—from the Baltimore Catechism, from a whole immigrant Boston that taught its children where the line was and then, when love made it necessary, crossed it. This is pastiche in its oldest and most honest sense — not concealment, as plagiarism is, nor mockery, as parody can be, but homage: a debt acknowledged rather than hidden. I did not set out to prove I had read widely. I set out to show that admiration, followed far enough, becomes a form of collaboration across time — my sentences answering sentences finished long before I was born, the same way a later generation answers an earlier one without ever meeting it.
None of this needs to be seen to be felt. A reader who notices none of it will still receive the whole of what any given story here intends — a family, a grief, a reckoning, a grace arrived at honestly. I have never wanted my work to require a key. But for the reader who happens to look twice, there is a second book folded quietly inside the first, in every book I have written. I have put it there on purpose, the way you might leave a light on in a room you don’t expect anyone to enter, just in case someone does. That second reader owes me nothing for the light. I only wanted it on.
I understand this practice is easy to mislabel. In a writer, repetition is often read as a failure of invention, or worse, as a kind of theft from oneself. I do not experience it that way, and I do not think the record of my own work supports that reading. What returns in my writing is declared, not disguised — named outright when it matters, left as a private grace note when it does not, but never smuggled in on the assumption that no one would notice either way. When the chalice is stolen in one story and returned in the next, the reader is meant to see both movements. When the same twilit star appears above two hospital lawns, it is not carelessness. It is the point. I would rather a reader catch me returning to something than believe, wrongly, that I had run out of anything new to say. Recurrence, done honestly, is not the absence of invention. It is invention’s clearest proof: that a thing was worth making once and may be worth making again.
A Sacred Thread
What I have been describing, in Emerson’s language and in Hegel’s and in Einstein’s, comes down finally to a single conviction that runs, thread by thread, through every book I have written: that the living and the dead are joined, and that a life honestly told is a small opening onto that larger fabric. Emerson gave it the name I still find most useful, the Oversoul: the great current beneath every separate life. I do not mean this as decoration. I mean that the boy in Give Them Unquiet Dreams who sees his dead grandfather beneath a maple tree, and the boy in these Aiden stories who sees the same figure on a hospital lawn, are not two boys having the same hallucination. They are one boy, briefly permitted to see what is always there. Second sight, in my work, is not a supernatural gift. It is the ordinary human refusal to let the beloved dead be gone.
The recurrences that mark my body of work follow from this belief. I return, again and again, to the same figures and the same rooms because I believe they are the same figures and the same rooms—that grief and grace, once entered into, do not stay behind. The Grandmother is the constant: Nana in these stories, Nana in Give Them Unquiet Dreams, the immigrant woman with the rosary and the cigarette and the ledger of small dishonesties committed on behalf of love. She is not a character I have deepened over the years so much as a presence I have learned to sit with longer. Behind her, half in shadow, stands the Grandfather—the drinker, the autodidact, the ghost on the lawn with the bottle-thick glasses, the one whose sentence about goodness saves a chalice a generation later. The Mother is broken and luminous: her second sight named as illness by the doctors, honored as inheritance by the child. The Father is the one going the wrong way in the snow, unable to admit it. The Boy—Aiden, Josh, whatever name I have given him—is the one who has been asked, too early, to hold the family up, and who does, and who pays for it.
The scenes recur as well, and I mean for them to. The stolen sacred object—a chalice, a rosary, a set of keys—returned or restored. The kitchen table where a lie is told for someone’s protection and, at the same table, later, a prayer. The hospital corridor, its ordinary institutional cruelties softened by the odd holy figure a nurse or aide turns out to be. The car ride home in silence after everything has changed. The window at dawn, someone at it, someone gone. The twilit star. Yeats’s bee-loud glade, first as a poem, then as a boat, then as a real body of water a woman remembers she once lived beside. The blindfolded figure on the light-brown globe, playing a lyre with a single string, in a print called Hope. A snowfall that both hides and reveals. A watch stopped at 1:03. These are not motifs I chose out of a workshop drawer. They are the furniture of the house I have been living in as a writer, and I move them from novel to poem to story the way any person moves the good chair from one room to another when the light changes.
The conflicts recur, too, because they are the conflicts I know. Faith against psychiatry: the Catholic child’s knowledge that his mother is not sick but visited, running up against the doctor’s knowledge that she is not visited but sick. Both parties love the woman; both are, in their own light, right; the story survives by refusing to choose. Loyalty against law: the grandmother who steals what she cannot afford in order to keep the family fed and clothed and, once, cured. Duty against departure: the boy who wants a life of his own and the boy who cannot leave a grandmother at the kitchen window. Silence against confession: the immigrant reticence of not telling what happened, and the American compulsion to tell everything. These are not, I think, my private conflicts. They are the conflicts of Irish-American Catholic life in the second half of the twentieth century, and they belong to more people than have yet written them down.
I have written this ending, in different rooms and with different windows, more than once. The clearest version I have yet managed is the closing pages of Give Them Unquiet Dreams, and I would rather quote them here than restate them:
In every beginning is an ending, and in every ending is a beginning. There is no time between, only eternity. When we pass on, we move into another room. Our departed loved ones are a short distance away—in that room just beyond the doorway. They lean in softly, watching over us, taking turns to check that we are safe, placing unseen palms upon our hearts, whispering loveliness in our ears. They are joyful in our joy. They are sad in our sadness. They laugh as we laugh. And they tell stories. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
In the other room right now, in this eternal moment, Martin is talking with Grandpa. My father is talking with my mother. And my grandmother is chatting too. Nearby, a line of people stretches backward to the moment of Creation. A symphony of voices, murmurs, and inflections, mingling hands and mingling glances, observing the past, the present, and the future. In this time, at the same time, and for all time.
That is what I believe, and I would rather say it there, in a scene, than defend it here in an argument. Still, I want to name it plainly. The living and the dead are one people, united by love, which does not observe the border we imagine between them. Love is an eternal presence, and it moves in both directions—forward toward the ones not yet arrived, and backward, no less real, toward the ones we say have gone. All life is resurrection. Every experience we have had returns in another, subtly changed—a grandmother’s hand at the back of a grandson’s neck becoming, a generation later, that grandson’s hand at the back of his own son’s; a mother’s fingers tracing the shape of a face becoming, without warning, the same tracing at another bedside, decades on, in another light. No person is ever lost. We are their resurrections. We relive their lives in transfiguration—altered, and altered again—and paradoxically imbued, in every alteration, with a great sameness that is not repetition but recognition, the sameness of a single spark passing through many lanterns. In this time, in all time, and eternally. And because all time, in the end, is the same time, we are one people: not divided into the living and the dead, but united by a single essential spark that illuminates, in each of us for a little while, the consciousness of the Oversoul: hallowed, and whole. To write, for me, has been to sit close enough to that spark to feel its heat, and to record honestly the small ordinary rooms in which it becomes briefly visible—a kitchen, a hospital corridor, a snowbound car heading, as fathers do, the wrong way home.
My debts, in all this, are declared rather than smuggled. Yeats gave me the bee-loud glade and the title “Arise and Go Now.” Joyce gave me the last paragraph of “The Dead,” which I have been trying, in my honest moments, to answer for thirty years—the snow “general all over Ireland,” falling on the living and the dead alike, because they are one country. Dickens gave me the Ghost of Christmas Past, going the wrong way in a snowstorm. Emily Dickinson gave me the permission to end on a hyphen. Flannery O’Connor gave me grace as ambush. Emerson gave me the Oversoul. Thoreau gave me the sentence underlined in a dead man’s book. Whitman gave me the confidence that one small immigrant kitchen in Boston could contain, if I looked at it long enough, everyone I would ever meet or lose. I would rather a reader hear those voices moving underneath mine than not hear them. My work is not an argument for originality. It is an argument for company—across the border between the living and the dead, and across the border between one writer’s book and another’s.
Beneath the theology and the theory, though, lies something plainer, and I want to end there rather than in abstraction. Long before I had read Emerson or Hegel, or understood what Einstein believed about time, I had a grandmother named Helen, who prayed to the Blessed Mother before anyone else, loved me by whatever means were available to her, honest and otherwise, and has never, in any real sense I can measure, left my work. Every grandmother in every book I have written is, in some flawed and partial way, a return to her. Catherine, in these stories—Nana—is one such return: not Helen, and not a portrait of Helen, but the same current running through a different vessel, honest about its dishonesties, tender in the shape her tenderness could take. I did not need a philosophy to justify that. I needed one only later, to explain it to myself. Everything else — the guides, the snow, the borrowed names, the verses pasted onto the backs of old photographs — is what I found once I went looking for the shape of what I already believed: that nothing we love is ever finished happening. It only goes quiet, waits to be carried forward, and rises again, a little changed, in someone else’s hands, or in mine, one more time.
— James Mulhern