Benjamin Black’s picnic at Howth alludes to James Joyce’s Ulysses. The date is the same fifty-two years later, June 16, 1956, but the picnickers and their intentions are very different.
In Ulysses, Leopold Bloom, and Marian “Molly,” Tweedy make love on the grass at Howth Head, Dublin. In A Death in Summer, Black’s picnickers, David Sinclair, Phoebe Griffin, and Dannie Jewell, socialize among the rhododendrons on Howth Head. Bloom and Molly eat seedcakes. But Phoebe, David, and Dannie are ready for a proper picnic with sandwiches, biscuits, and wine. They appear ordinary, but they are each deeply anxious. Danni is troubled by her brother’s death, and Phoebe and Sinclair are in the midst of a wobbly affair. The ham sandwiches are props for a picnic, nothing more.
They took the bus to Sutton and then mounted the little tram that whirred and rattled its way up the long slope of Howth Head. Phoebe had packed the picnic, ham sandwiches on brown bread with lettuce and sliced tomatoes, and cucumber cut in four ways, and pickles in a jar, and a fancy tin of biscuits from Smyths on the Green. Sinclair and Danni had each brought a bottle of wine, and Dannie had a basket with glasses wrapped in napkins. They kept meeting each other’s eyes and smiling, a little bashfully, for they felt suddenly childish and exposed, to be on an outing, like ordinary people and ordinarily happy.
Featured Image: Bloom (Stephen Rea) and Tweedy (Angeline Ball) embrace the grassy hillside at Howth, with no rhododendrons in sight. Sean Walsh’s Bloom (2003).
See Benjamin Black, aka John Banville. A Death in Summer: A Novel. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2011; Sean Walsh. Bloom (2003). The screenplay by Sean Walsh is based on James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922).
Featured Image: Bloom (Stephen Rea) and Tweedy (Angeline Ball) embrace the grassy hillside at Howth, with no rhododendrons in sight. Sean Walsh’s Bloom (2003).