FrankBudgen's .James .

Joyce and the Making

of' Ulysses', first published in 1934, is the
only f irst-hand account we have of the
growth ofJoyce's great work. The record
of the painter's friendship withJoyce in
Zurich in 1918-19, when Ulysses was being
written, it is also an acute critical com­
mentary on the novel itself. Long
unavailable in its original form, this
invaluable book is now reissued together
with three ofBudgen's essays: J ' ames
Joyce's Chapters of Going Forth by Day'
(1939-41), onFinnegans Wake; a deeply
felt obituary of th� writer; and 'Further
Recollections ofJamesJoyce' ( I 955). In
his introduction theJoyce scholar Clive
Hart, Professor of English at the Univer­
sity of Dundee, draws on unpublished
Joyce material to trace the history of
Budgen's book, and pays a personal
tribute to the author, his friend, who
died in 1971 at the age of eighty-nine.

FRANKBUDGEN (1882-1971), born in

Surrey, spent six years of his youth at sea,
then worked in London as a postal sorter
and at other odd jobs before going to
Paris in 1910 to study painting. He spent
the First World War years in Switzerland,
and in 1 920 returned to London, where he
lived and painted until his death.
Myselves When Young, his memoir of his
early life, was published in 1970.

Jacket illustration: Joyce and the author in the

Pfauen cafe in Ziirich, from a drawing by
Frank Budgen. Endpapers: Sketch ofJoyce in I g I g,
by Frank Budgen.

£3.50 net
in U.K.
 FRANK BUDGEN

JAMES JOYCE
and the Making of 'Ulysses'

and other writings

with an introduction by
CLIVE HART

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

London Oxford Melbourne
1972
 Oxford University Press
LONDON OXFORD NEW YORK
GLASGOW TORONTO MELBOURNE WELLINGTON
CAPE TOWN IBADAN NAIROBI DAR ES SALAAM LUSAKA ADDIS ABABA
DELHI BOMBAY CALCUTTA MADRAS KARACHI LAHORE DACCA
KUALA LUMPUR SINGAPORE HONG KONG TOKYO

Clothbound edition ISBN o 19 2rr713 o

Paperback edition ISBN o 19 281125 8

New material in this edition

© Estate of the late Frank Budgen 1972

James Joyce and the Making ef 'Ulysses' first published by

Grayson & Grayson Ltd., London, 1934; reissued, with
additional material, by Indiana University Press,
Bloomington, Indiana, 1960, Copyright© 1960
by Indiana University Press

This edition published simultaneously in clothbound form

and as an Oxford University Press paperback, by
Oxford University Press, London, 1972

Paperback edition not for sale in the

United States and Canada

In addition to those publishers acknowledged in the

Author's Note, p. 7, and on p. 5, thanks are due to
the Trustees of theJoyce Estate, to The Bodley Head Ltd.,
publishers of the presently available edition of
Ulysses, and to Faber & Faber Ltd., publishers of
Finnegans Wake and the three-volume Letters of
James Joyce, for permission to quote from the
works ofJamesJoyce.

Printed in Great Britain by

Fletcher & Son Ltd, Norwich
 CONTENTS

Introduction by Clive Hart vn

A Note on this Edition xx1
James Joyce and the Making of' Ulysses' ( 1934)
Preface 3
Author's Note 7
Chapters I-XIV 9
Other Writings
Joyce's Chapters of Going Forth by Day
(1939-4 1) 323
James Joyce ( 194 1) 343
Further Recollections ofJames Joyce ( 1955) 349
Index 367
 IN DUCTION
/
James Joyce and the Making ef' Ulysses', although hot generally avail­
able in Britain in recent years, has long been held in high esteem as
one of the two or three indispensable books about Joyce and his
works. While I had been familiar with it since adolescence, I did
not meet Frank Budgen until the 1950s when, after having been
employed in various jobs, I went up to Cambridge as a research
student working on Joyce. Despite a difference of nearly half a
century in our ages, we soon established a friendship which was easy
and natural, and which contained no hint of paternalism or patron­
age on his part. From then until his death in April 1971, we grew
intimate, and while I could never, of course, have hoped to be as
close to him as were the friends he had made in his young manhood,
he was among the half-dozen people who:rp I knew and loved best.
One of Budgen's many fine qualities was a gift for making new
friendships with people of all ages. Although he used occasionally to
grumble about the unfortunate effects of technological progress on
the quality of life in London and elsewhere, he never failed, even in
his last years, to welcome new life, new experience. In his thirties,
when he and Joyce were closest, Budgen must have been a most
stimulating companion. Even in his eighties he was an excellent
man at a party, enjoying the company of people of all kinds, being
lionized by many of the men and by virtually all of the women, talk­
ing with zest, listening (as few people do) with equal zest. It was
when he was in the company of a number of his friends that one saw
most clearly the vigorous, intelligent, endlessly curious man whom
Joyce had known.
Budgen was of medium height, solidly built, with quite remark­
ably powerful shoulders and orie"of the soundest physiques I have
ever seen. He was very much at home in the physical world, being
visually and tactilely sensitive, as plastic artists must be, to all that
was going on around him, and always keen to be physically in touch.
...Vlll INTRODUCTION

The world was, for Budgen, a real and solid place, and, although he
was capable of extended abstract thought, it was never in abstrac­
tion that he wished to live. Apart from the personal attentions of a
loving family, he disliked having anything done for him which he
could conceivably do for himself and was still, in his mid-eighties, to
be seen clearing blocked drains with his bare hands and (until his
wife and daughter persuaded him to have central heating installed)
carrying anthracite to the stove in the spacious living-room of his
home in north London. Since childhood he had been used to turn­
ing his hand to almost anything. As he tells us in his memoir of his
early life, Myseb;es When Young (1970), he had worked at a variety of
jobs, had been an active and vocal socialist politician, stumping the
country as far north as Dundee, and had become a practised soap­
box orator. In all this he was, of course, Joyce's opposite. Joyce,
too, savoured the physical world, but he did so at something of a
remove. Sinewy, but hardly tough, Joyce liked to have things done
for him rather than to do them himself. Budgen was very much 'the
other'. A man self-taught since the age of twelve provides a sharp
contrast to a Jesuit-trained artist with a university degree. Tempera­
mentally, too, there were great differences: Joyce disliked water,
dogs, lightning; Budgen had been a sailor, loved and had a natural
affinity for animals, was awed but not at all frightened by spectacular
natural phenomena.
. Budgen sometimes spoke of himself, deprecatingly, as having been
a Shaun to Joyce's Shem, but the pattern was more complex than
that and, despite his.awareness of Budgen's otherness, Joyce recog­
nized that he could never be reduced to a simple anti-self. For
Budgen was also an artist, and an artist in a medium which Joyce
never claimed to understand. That kind of otherness could not be
written off as Joyce sometimes tried to write off the otherness of his
brother Stanislaus. Budgen commanded respect, and he did so not
only because of the complete seriousness of his approach to his art,
but also because he was never in the least inclined to be subservient
to Joyce. In Joyce he recognized a master of words, and this he
admired and enjoyed. But being self-taught he belonged to .no
schools, had no time for cliques, cultural fashions, or critical move­
ments, and was totally without affectation of any kind. For Budgen
James Joyce was not only Joyce the writer to whose work one paid
 INTRODUCTION
.
IX
due homage, but also Joyce the man, with many faults as weil as
many virtues. Furthermore, Budgen, the self-taught man, had
taught himself remarkably well. He had spent some years painting
in Paris in the great days before the First World War, and he was
quite as much at home among writers and artists as was Joyce. He
was a rare and interesting mixture of artist and practical man, in
some respects a more complete person than Joyce could ever be.
While Budgen was pleased to be of assistance to his sometimes
purblind friend, he also had a very full life of his own to lead, and
the idea of devoting himself ahl).ost body and soul to Joyce and
Joyce's art, as Paul Leon was to do for a time, would have been
wholly repugnant to him. It.was partly because Budgen respected
Joyce, was prepared to help, as one helps any intimate friend, but
had no intention of being subjected to Joyce's will, that Joyce found
him so refreshing and valuable a person. Budgen had resilience and
a kind of toughness which must have proved attractive to Joyce
(also in his own way resilient) and which must have been still more
highly prized in later years when Joyce was surrounded, as was
so often the case, by yes-men, faddists, and cultists. Not only that,
but Budgen's attitude to the arts, though less experimental than
Joyce's, less intellectual, was at bottom not so very dissimilar. The
thought in Joyce's works was, by his own admission, always (or
almost always) simple. His novels, though superficially avant-garde,
were composed on a groundwork of accurate realism, both physical
and psychological. In their fundamentals, Ulysses, and even
Finnegans Wake, are artistically, aesthetically, utterly unlike the
dadaist, surrealist, transitional, revolution-of-the-word works which
they sometimes superficially resemble. And because they are so
positivist, so grounded in common sense and cause and effect, they
were much more clearly understood in principle, if not always in
detail, by a Frank Budgen than, for example, by a EugeneJolas.
Among the visual artists Budgen's heroes were, as he himself used
to say, the impressionists, and he c_ontinued to paint in that now un­
fashionable mode until, in his last years, his eyes began to fail. His
canvases, which are almost always full of light, are representational
in a suggestive rather than a denotative way, and the best of them
shimmer with. multicoloured sunshine and shadow. On the surface
they seem to have little to do with Joyce and his books, but both
X INTRODUCTION
men, although going beyond simple representation, made it the
essential structural basis of their work. As Budgen himself says at
the end of'Further Recollections ofJamesJoyce' (1955) :
When I met Mrs. Joyce in Zurich after the war, she told me that
during the day preceding the sudden onset of his fatal seizure
Joyce had been to an exhibition of French nineteenth-century
painting. Somehow there seems to me to be an affinity there, I
mean between French nineteenth-century painters and Joyce, in
the sense that all the work of his imagination and intellect was
rooted, as was theirs, in a natural sensibility. (P. 366.)
Neither Budgen nor Joyce had much patience with abstract art;
neither of them was interested in automatic creativity which short­
circuits the connection between spirit and hand; each believed in
the artistic value of hard work and the rational application of tech­
nique. (Budgen once said that he would like to be able to paint'the
way Brahms writes symphonies'.) But above all it was in their con­
ception of the relationship between the art-work and the rest of the
universe that they were alike: although their creations might depart
from the day-to-day reality of ordinary people, they were rooted in
it, and ultimately responsible to it.
Bloom is pre-eminent in Ulysses not only as the most important
centre of consciousness, the most important 'character', but also as
the bearer of the central values and the perceiver of the central
percepts. He is near to being, as Joyce wanted him to be, 'a com­
plete man, a good man', and while Ulysses transcends him aesthetic­
ally, it celebrates him morally. Furthermore, although the art of
Ulysses goes beyond anything of which Bloom could conceive, it is
based on his own Weltanschauung. Among other things this is, as one
critic has said, a novel of'cups and saucers, chairs and tables, sticks
and stones', a novel in which the physical world, perceived as real by
the simple act of knocking one's sconce against it, counts for a great
deal. The moral and psychological problems of Ulysses, which are
explored with such sensitivity, are the problems of men and women
who live in, and respond to, a real physical environment. Without
that environment the problems, and the characters, would simply
fade away.
Budgen was, of course, a far more substantial figure than Bloom,
and he shared neither Bloom's nor Joyce's sexual obsessions, but
 INTRODUCTION XI

allowing for differences of scale and of important detail, Joyce could

recognize in Budgen a man who understood the Blooms of the world
from the inside. Again, while Joyce had managed to shake off the
chains of a mighty religious organization and emerge into common
life fairly unscathed but necessarily conscious at all times of his
Catholic background, Budgen had quietly slipped, with no great
effort, from a sometimes fanatical but ultimately low-powered
evangelicism which left him, for most of his life, an orth�dox agnostic,
indifferent to the claims of religion, though not disposed positively
to deny the existence of a god-some god-and an afterlife. Budgen's
personal disinterestedness and his natural respect for the spiritual
and emotional value which belief may provide for others, made him,
once again, similar to the kindly, doubting Bloom. Indeed, Budgen
might almost have been speaking of himself when, describing
Bloom's reactions at the funeral, he wrote: 'His mind is proof
against the pathos of religion, but, seeing that some rite is necessary,
as well this as another.'
Criticism of Urysses has shown, over the first half-century of the
novel's existence, that it can be all books to all men. Some read it as
strenuously Catholic-a cry from a man eternally shut out; others
see it as bitterly anti-religious. For some it is a celebration of the
virtues of the bourgeois; for others it is an indictment of urban
civilization. Budgen's view of the general tenor of Urysses was un­
doubtedly influenced by Joyce, who had consciously tempered his
comments on the book to the personality and tastes of his friend.
Budgen reports:
Joyce's first question when I had read a completed episode or
when .he had read out a passage of an uncompleted one was
always: 'How does Bloom strike you?'
Technical considerations, problems of homeric correspondence,
the chemistry of the human body, were secondary matters. If
Bloom was first it was not that the others were unimportant but
that, seen from the outside, they were not a problem. (Pp. 106-7.)
At other times and with other interlocutors Joyce was capable of
suggesting other emphases, but the version of the truth which he
both implicitly and explicitly conveyed to Budgen comes closest to
the spirit of the book as I read it. Budgen concludes that the novel
as a whole is amoral but accepting, contemplative but sceptical:
Xll INTRODUCTION

. it seems to me that Joyce neither hates nor loves, neither

curses nor praises the world, but that he affirms it with a 'Yes' as
positive as that with which Marion Bloom affirms her prerogative
on the last page. It is not to him a brave new world, about to set
forth tipon some hitherto unattempted enterprise. Rather is it a
brave old world, for ever flowing like a river, ever seeming to
change yet changing never. The prevailing attitude of Ulysses is a
very humane scepticism-not of tried human values, necessary at
all times for social cohesion, but of all tendencies and systems
whatsoever. There are moods of pity and grief in it, but the
prevailing mood is humour. (P. 73.)
Budgen was able to adopt this point of view because he was con­
tent to let the book mean what it says. Although he was widely read
in literature and philosophy of all kinds (more widely read, I believe,
than Joyce ) he was not disposed to treat Ulysses as allegory, to search
for recondite meanings, to translate its plain sense into something
else, to say, as so many seem to want to do these days\ 'A = B, hey
presto, we have proved something!' Reading a book was for Frank
Budgen both a simpler and a more arduous matter than that: he
wanted to know what it was actually saying. James Joyce and the
Making of' Ulysses' was the first attempt to provide a reading of the
novel in those direct terms, and it is still one of the very best. The
length and complexity of Ulysses make the shaping of a complete
commentary a singularly difficult matter. Budgen fourid for his
book a most satisfying rhythm and structure, matching biography
to criticism in a way which n�t only allows each to illuminate the
other, but shows their fundamental interdependence.

Joyce's response to Budgen's suggestion that he write the book is

summed up by Budgen himself in the preface to the 1960 edition:
Joyce's attitude ...changed from that of benevolent scepticism to
one of enthusiastic approval. During my short stay in Paris he
gave me many suggestions for improving and enriching my text
and when I moved on to Ascona letters dictated to Paul Leon
fi,>llowed in the same strain. Some of these are incorporated in the
text of the present book.... (P.5.)
While this is accurate, it is insufficiently detailed to convey the full
flavour of Joyce's participation in the writing. Though by far the
greater part of the book stems from Budgen alone, in 1932 and 1933
 INTRODUCTION
...
Xlll

Joyce sent sheet after sheet of suggestions which, when adopted,

turned some parts of it into a collaborative effort.*. In the beginning
there was no difficulty in incorporating new material, but as
Budgen's book went to press changes became increasingly trouble­
some to make. Joyce, who was merciless to publishers and printers,
had no hesitation in suggesting that Budgen should act in the same
way as he himself had done in 1921 when seeing Ulysses through
Darantiere's in Dijon. At the end of a sheet of suggestions called
'Les dernieres des dernieres', Paul Leon wrote, on Joyce's behalf:
Revise proofs: What you do not get in on the galleys you can add
on the revise. He advises you to get in all these small points and if
the expense exceeds the usual six shillings per sheet-page he will
defray the cost himself but by cheque coming through you, so long
as the publication is not retarded.
The suggestions on that sheet, which Budgen incorporated, were
followed by at least one further batch, headed'Les Toutes dernieres
des Dernieres (leaving only one other possibility which is les toutes
dernieres des toutes dernieres) '. Most of the material consists of
additions to passages of local colour, autobiographical details and
corrections, and explanations of parts of'Work in Progress'. Some­
times Joyce would simply list items under various rubrics without
further comment, as he did for example ·on four sheets headed
'Zurich Figures', written out for him by Lucia:t
Metzger Lenz. A more than Velasquez figure meat warrior. He
occupied all the tram platform.
The King of Oil's daughter, born Edith Rockefeller, ill favoured,
malsaine fantastic distinguished and benevolent, she stalked
about the town distributing charities houses and jachts. Rossen
* Joyce's note-sheets, which were found among Budgen's papers after his death,
are with one or two exceptions unpublished. In what follows, I have had space to
quote only a small proportion of the material. Except for a few words written by
Joyce himself, everything was taken. down by Lucia and Paul Leon at Joyce's
dictation. Some of the notes are in the hands of the amanuenses; others, generally
the most important, are in typescript. Many were annotated by Budgen as he
worked on them, and a few contain, in the margins, drafts of sentences for his
book. Most of the note-sheets are undated. They are quoted here by permission of
the Trustees of the Joyce Estate.
t The notes printed here reproduce the sometimes idiosyncratic spelling of the
amanuenses.
XIV INTRODUCTION
[Rawson] taught her husband Mc Cormick to whistle the song
it ain't gonna Waltza no more.
Oom Paul Of Niederdorf Ministre de la Grille, Dutch interior
mais ou sont les Bifteks D'Antan?
L'homme qui rit. He had a lion's mouth from ear to ear and walked
about the bourse with a copious english newspaper held up to
his face.
Budgen made use of these passages in various ways, toning down the
violent description of the recently deceased Edith Rockefeller (and
omitting altogether a sardonic marginal addition written by Joyce
himself: 'She is the daughter of one Rockefeller/Whose oil brought
more death into our/World and much of our woe') :
Mrs.MacCormick has a suite of rooms there. She is daughter of a
king, an oil king, born Edith Rockefeller, and one of the richest
women in the world....Fantastic, distinguished, benevolent, she
walks the town scattering right and left charities, houses and
yachts.... Mr. Rawson, a friend of Joyce, taught Mr. Mac­
Cormick to whistle'It ain't gonna waltza no more.'
Here and there about the town one sees a tall bearded man of
royal carriage. An exiled king? They are becoming common.
No, a reigning monarch. His realm is called the 'Meierei,' a
grill-room in Niederdor£ ...His name is Oom Jan....I heard
with grief of the death of that great Dutchman. Ou sont les
bifteks d'antan?
...Butcher Lenz, in girth surpassing Velasquez's actor, takes
up all the platform of a tram designed for five and a conductor.
L'homme qui rit walks round the bourse with a copious English
newspaper held up to his face. He has a lion's mouth that
stretches from ear to ear. (Pp.28-9.)
Joyce's suggestions fitted very effectively into Budgen's extended
collage of Zurich life in wartime.
Most of Joyce's notes, although lively enough, are set down with­
out noticeable intrusion of the linguistic experimentation and
mythico-symbolic grotesquerie in which he was by 1933 so im­
mersed. Occasionally, however, he indulged his love of word-play,
and in such cases Budgen used or discarded as seemed appropriate.
Joyce's comment on the Zurich figure Sigmund Feilbogen, for
example, is taken over only in part:
Sigmund Feilbogen Ear trumpet which he oriented and occidented
night and day to catch rumours of peace anywhere at ar;i.y hour.
 INTRODUCTION xv
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune had hit him hard.
Said to have lost his proffesorship in the higher school of
Commerce in Vienna because his wife (Rubens type with one
eye gone West) urged by female curiosity half consumed the
host the pope gave her in St. Peter's and then spat it into her
handkerchief.
Budgen, no doubt sensing that this colourful passage was not
entirely in keeping with the tone of his context, reduced it to:
One time professor in the higher school of commerce in Vienna,
Sigmund Feilbogen haunts the Cafe des Banques, with an ear­
trumpet which he orients and occidents night and day to catch
rumours of peace anywhere at any hour (p.29) .
'Orients and occidents' exemplifies a kind of word-play which
Budgen found natural to his own linguistic temper (potential non­
posters of letters were warned against leaving them in 'poche
restante') , but the last part of the story probably struck him as
vaguely distasteful.
Where the tone was appropriate, Budgen was quite capable of
using lateJoycean methods himself. In the'dernieres des dernieres'
Leon wrote to Budgen to say that Joyce had inquired about the
motto of the city of Zurich:
He wrote to prof Fehr for the arms and motto: ... The latin
motto is: Nobile turricum multarum copia rerum. The version
on the gate is phonetic: it means Noble Zurich abounding in all
manner merchandise. Turricum for the Zuricher in war time
meant only a boot polish and the abundance in merchandise
could be worked in about the butter cards.
The passage about the butter cards occurs on page 31 of Budgen's
book, but he chose, instead, to work inJoyce's suggestion at a point
more convenient for the printer, in the last paragraph of Chapter II,
where, like the Joyce of'Work in Progress', he leaves it to his reader
to recognize the hidden allusion to the Zurich motto, crowning his
celebration of the city: 'noble Turricum, in spite of rationing,
abounded in all manner of goodly merchandise'.
Special mention should perhaps be made of the long set-piece on
women's underclothing on pp. 213-14. Although Budgen, who
looked upon Bloom's obsessions with kindly interest but without
XVI INTRODUCTION

involvement, could not share Joyce's intense concern with the para-.
phernalia of sex, he responded to a plea from Joyce, sent through
Leon in a letter dated 30 March 1933:
As a personal favour he would like you when treating the subject
of the Nausikaa episode to reconsider the way you have dealt with
the mysteries of ladies' toilet and to remember that some words
are too sacred to be either said or written.
Joyce later repeated his request in a further letter, dated 7 May
1933.* The disquisition on underwear, and Budgen's illustration for
the Nausikaa episode, among those reproduced in the first edition
of his book, were included as gestures of friendship.
As Budgen himself points out in the 'Further Recollections', he
felt no obligation to accept those suggestions of Joyce's which were
alien to his temperament. On several of the note-sheets he made
annotations indicating his opinion of the offerings. One of Joyce's
notes, qm;>ted in part in'Further Recollections', is headed 'BIRTH­
NIGHT chezJ.J.':
We did not sing either the Wearing of the Green or And Shall
Trelawney Die? in honour of our respective Irish and Cornish
forebears . . . but the evening was sure to close with a rendering by
Ruggiero and J. of the Greek National Anthem-xatpE, xaipE,
'EMvfhpia (Hail Hail oh! Liberty!)

Against this Budgen wrote, at various times, three notes: a bold

'Left Out'; 'Don't remember' (in'Further Recollections' he is more
positive: 'we didn't') ; and 'don't like quoting Greek'. Under the
heading 'TENOR', Joyce, via Leon, writes about what is now
Finnegans Wake 427.10-13:
W i P Pt II sect. 1 and 2 contain frequent lyrical reminiscences
of count MacCormack's voice. He is alluded to in J.J.'s letter to
S published in the New Statesman asthe tuning fork among tenors.
W i P part I almost closes with a suspired rendering of the famous
recitative E lucean le stelle by a pipe smoking Cavaradossi
beginning: 'And the stellas were shining' and breaking into the
moving romance measure with the version: 0 dulcid dreamings
languidous! Taboccoo!
*Letters <ifJames Joyce, 3 vols., ed. S. Gilbert and R. Ellmann (London: Faber &
Faber, and New York: The Viking Press, 1966), III. 279---80.
 INTRODUCTION xvn
In the margin of this illuminating paragraph Budgen, never a par­
ticularly musical man, adds the simple remark: 'Can't write about
music.'
A great many ofJoyce's suggestions concern, as this one does, his
real love of the moment, 'Work in Progress', which now interested
him much more than did Ulysses. Mentioning Chapelizod, which
Budgen had recently visited atJoyce's suggestion, he invites Budgen
'to work in actual names of persons there, from your visit'; he is
particularly concerned with the Blake parallels, duly emphasized by
Budgen towards the end of his last chapter; and there is one highly
interesting passage about the fundamental principles of 'Work in
Progress' (paraphrased in'Further Recollections', page 361):
Yeats's defence & definition of magic: a) The borders of our minds
are always shifting tending to become part of the universal mind
b) The borders of our memory also shift and form part of uni­
versal memory c) This universal mind & memory can be evoked
by symbols
It should be pointed out that Mr J. lived amidst all this
(including Yeats) and his library was full of theosophicle works
though he did not use any of the recognised symbols-using
instead words trivial and quadrivia! and local geographical
allusions (Trivial meaning litterally-carrefour-where three
roads meet).
Some valuable remarks of Joyce's had to be omitted altogether
from the book. Among the most interesting is a reference to Bloom's
bath, in Lotus Eaters: 'Does your reader realize what a unique event
this was in the Dublin I knew up to 1904.' Another refers to the
'King v. Humphrey' sequence of'Work in Progress': 'You say this is
a difficult case [Budgen, p. 307] but some years ago I read a court in
India had to try a case of a hindu goddess (who was allowed to plead
by proxy) versus Rabindranth [sic] Tagore.'

While Budgen's book is the only extended account of any part of

Joyce's life written by someone who knew him intimately, in matters
of detail it is not, and was never intended to be, everywhere literally
true. Budgen himself gives a hint in his preface to the 1960 edition:
With a number of false starts in front of me I began to wonder if
Joyce's confidence in my original method of approach were not a
...XVlll INTRODUCTION

little too optimistic. Then out of the fog I was moving in I saw
emerging the shapes of a man, a book, a place, a time. I was able
to begin at the beginning and my memory was set free. It is
remarkable how much hindsight it takes to perceive the self­
evident. (P. 4. )

Both the portrait of the man and the book as a whole are shaped by
Budgen the artist. Time also, as he implies, is consciously shaped,
moulded, adapted to the overall design. James Joyce and the Making
ef ' Uf:ysses' is a partly fictionalized biography, the general impression
of which is as true as Budgen can make it, but the details of which
are often manipulated in the interests of that greater truth­
Dichtung und Wahrheit, in fact. Many, perhaps most, of the remem­
bered conversations-'We were walking down the Ramistrasse
when, the Uetliberg before us suggesting a giant, Joyce said . . . '­
are worked up from comments in letters and note-sheets. Budgen
was not content merely to set down recollections of his day-to-day
contacts with Joyce. Memory being fallible and fragmented, he
would deliberately fictionalize in order to approach truth in­
directly.*
Joyce was well aware of the creative element in Budgen's book,
and he was at pains to encourage its development. A decade earlier
he had clearly recognized a parallel between Budgen and his hero,
Ulysses. Budgen, absent from home for some years, had returned to
London after the war ; Joyce wrote to him on 1 o December 1 920:

A point about Ulysses (Bloom) . He romances about Ithaca (Oi

want teh gow beck teh the Mawl Enn Rowd, s' elp me ! ) and when
he gets back it gives him the pip. I mention this because you in
your absence from England seemed to have forgotten the human
atmosphere and I the atmospheric conditions of these zones.
(Letters, I . 1 52.)
In 1 933 Joyce continually urged Budgen, another Ulysses-Bloom, to
include in his book more material about himself: ' Speaking of the
importance of the landscape more should be worked in about your
art' ; ' Curtail quotations or insert short explanatory sentences less
* Chapter VIII of Myselves When Young includes other recollections of Joyce,
generally of a more factual nature. In a book written so long after the deaths of
Joyce and Nora, Budgen also felt able to deal with certain aspects of Joyce's life
and personality as he could not have done in 1934.
 INTRODUCTION XIX

of J. more of yourself'. And in a note about Shaun the Post he

made the importance of the Budgen-Ulysses parallel explicit:
A passing allusion to your work in the GPO especially if you did
any nightwork would not be amiss in this connection. The more
bewildered the reader is as to whether you are painter, sculptor,
civil servant, sailor, postman etc. the better as the same applies to
Ulysses.
Budgen's book retells the story of Urysses just as Urysses retells that of
the Odyssey ; it was written by a similarly accretive method, with last­
minute changes; and the two characters who figure most promi­
nently in it, Joyce and Budgen, are often shown leaving aside their
real many-sidedness to play the roles of Stephen and Bloom.
That Budgen's book is such a happy mixture of clear-sighted
exposition and sympathetic personal understanding is due mainly to
the quality of the human relationship which he and Joyce were able
to establish with one another. With many people Joyce was, in
min:or ways, something of a poseur. As Budgen subtly indicates in the
scene of their first meeting and throughout the biographical pass­
ages, he was never taken in by the poses, which Joyce seems wisely
to have abandoned, except on rare occasions, after the development
of their intimacy. Budgen, although the most direct and unaffected
of men, knew how difficult it is to attain complete sincerity and
thorough self-knowledge. His comments about self-portraiture­
the artist being condemned to paint himself in the act of painting
himself, inevitably watching himself act to himself-contain some of
the wisest things ever said, directly or by implication, about the
relationship of writer to subject inJoyce's basically autobiographical
art. But Bl.ldgen was more than the ideal commentator: he was, as
Joyce realized, the successful embodiment of that desired fusion
which never occurs in Urysses-the spiritual marriage of Stephen
and Bloom.
CLIVE HART
University of Dundee
October r97 I
 A NOTE ON THIS EDITION
For this edition the text of James Joyce and the Making of' Ulysses' has
been produced by photolithography from the 1934 British edition. It
includes a few corrections, mostly of simple typographical errors.
The last line of the German poem on page 13 has been corrected, in
accordance with Frank Budgen's expressed wishes. The quotations
from Ulysses have been somewhat emended. It has not been possible
to alter the inverted commas which Budgen (or his publisher) used
to indicate quoted dialogue, where Joyce always used the simple
opening dash; nor have spellings and capitalization been made to
conform with the printed text of Ulysses. But punctuation has been
emended, and missing words restored, the guiding principle being
that when read aloud the Joycean passages should sound correct.
The book, written at a time when Ulysses had been much less
carefully scrutinized than it has been today, includes a few small
errors. These have not been altered, but the following should per­
haps be mentioned: On pages 124 and 126 Budgen has the Mirus
Bazaar at Sandymount, whereas it was held in Ballsbridge; Almi­
dano Artifoni does not take a tram, but misses it and has to walk
(p. 126); there are seventeen, not eighteen, sections between the
appearance of Conmee and that of the Viceroy (p. 126) ; Haines's
assignation with Mulligan ( Oxen ofthe Sun) is for ten past eleven, not
half past (p. 227); Murphy's son is eighteen years old, not sixteen
(p. 258); Alexander Thom was a printer and publisher, not an
auctioneer (p. 278). A slightly more substantial matter arises from
Budgen's treatment of Joyce's letter of 16 August 1921 about
Penelope, quoted on page 269 . In the 1934 edition, Budgen, perhaps
quoting from memory, altered the text of the letter (now published in
full in Letters, 1. 169-70), and this has been left unchanged, except for
the alteration of 'glass' to 'class'. Readers may care to compare the
passage quoted on page 272 with the end of the actual letter, where
the context makes clear thatJoyce's description refers to the episode,
not to Molly herself, as Budgen has it.
xxn A NOTE ON THIS EDITION
A comparison of the text of the British edition of 1934 with that of
the American edition of the same year (published by Harrison Smith
and Haas) will reveal half a dozen minor textual variants. The
British edition contains some late additions and changes suggested by
Joyce in his note-sheets. These changes were not made in the
original American edition, which was independently set, nor were
they incorporated in the 1960 Indiana University Press paperback
reprint, prepared by photolithography from the Harrison Smith
and Haas edition.
The 'second edition' issued in Britain in 1937 was in fact a straight
reprint of the 1934 edition with which it is identical.
The present edition retains the original Author's Note of 1933 and
the interesting preface to the 1960 reprint; it contains in addition
three of Budgen's important articles on Joyce: the review-article on
Finnegans Wake, written in 1939 and first published in Horizon, IV
(September 1941) ; the deeply felt obituary, first published in
Horizon, IV (February 1941) ; and the 'Further Recollections of
JamesJoyce', first issued as a pamphlet in 1955, but published in its
present revised form in Partisan Review (New York), XXIII (Fall
1956), and reprinted in the 1960 American edition. In these addi­
tional pieces, which have been newly set, the quotations have been
emended in full except in the case ofJoyce's letter of 16 August 192 1 ,
again quoted wrongly at page 323.
Joyce's unpublished letters and note-sheets were made available
to me by the kindness of Joan Budgen, Frank Budgen's literary ex­
ecutrix, without whose assistance the writing of this introduction
would not have been possible. I must also offer thanks to Francine
Budgen, for the warmth of her friendship, and to Catharine Carver,
both for her careful editorial work and for her patience.
C.H.
 JAMES JOYCE
AND THE

MAKING OF 'ULYSSES'

1934
 PREFACE
to the 1 960 Edition

This book may be said to owe its existence to a conversation

that took place one Sunday afternoon during the winter of
1931-2 at the home of my friend Patrick Kirwan, novelist, .
writer for stage and screen, and at that time reader for the
publishing house of Grayson and Grayson. We were at tea
when Mr. Rupert Grayson called and joined us. The con­
versation turned on Joyce. Kirwan said that I ought to write
a book about Joyce and that Grayson and Grayson ought to
publish it. Rupert Grayson tentatively fell in with the sug­
gestion. I agreed and said I would begin right away, for it
seems to be an occupational illusion of most painters that they
can write a book if they care to turn their hands to it. I very
quickly realized, however, that the first thing to do was to
write to Joyce and, if possible, get his blessing for the project.
It would have been very difficult in any case to get far if he
expressly disapproved.
As may be seen from his correspondence, Joyce was at that
time greatly worried about his daughter's health and his own,
and was also trying to get Ulysses published and on sale in
England. His reaction to my project appears in a letter dated
1 March 1932, the relevant passage of which reads: 'Now as
regards your projected book, if Gorman and Louis Golding
finish their biographies of me and if Harmsworth publishes
Charles Duff's J.J. and the plain reader with a preface by
Herbert Read yours will be the seventh book mainly about a
text which is unobtainable in England.' A reasoned scepticism
is always a little discouraging, but Joyce went on to say that he
thought my method of approach would probably be an ori­
ginal one, so that the green light was just visible.
 PREFACE
A blank white canvas and a palette set with bright colours
'have always been for me provocative and stimulating objects,
whereas white paper, pen and ink have always had upon me a
benumbing effect. I had never looked upon myself as a
Boswell or an Eckermann, and therefore it had never occurred
to me during my almost daily contact with Joyce in Zurich to
take notes of his conversation or indeed to keep a written
record of any kind. All that I h�d to supply both material con­
tent and form for my own text was a copy of Ulysses. Joyce had
at first a reasoned objection to my using the letters I had re­
ceived from him, except indirectly. With a number of false
. starts in front of me I began to wonder ifJoyce's confidence in
my original method of approach were not a little too optimistic.
Then out of the fog I was moving in I saw emerging the shapes
of a man, a book, a place, a time. I was able to begin at the
beginning and my memory was set free. It is remarkable how
much hindsight it takes to perceive the self-evident.
On the two occasions on which I was able to go to Paris
during the composition of the book I found Joyce most co­
operative. We swapped stories of the old days in Zurich and
I was helped with many valuable comments. In the spring of
1933Joyce very generously commissioned me to paint a picture
at Chapelizod near Dublin so that I might get the sight and
the sound and the feel and the smell of the town of the Ford of
Hurdles and its people. In the autumn of 1933 the galley
proofs arrived from the printers. I sent them on to Paris and
as soon as I could do so followed in their wake on my way to
Ascona. Joyce and Stuart Gilbert had already begun to read
and correct them. (SeeJoyce's letter to me dated 10 September
1933 in Letters ofJames Joyce, edited by Stuart Gilbert, 1957.)
Joyce's attitude had changed from that of benevolent scepti­
cism to one of enthusiastic approval. During my _short stay in
Paris he gave me many suggestions for improving and enrich­
ing my text and when I moved on to Ascona letters dictated to
Paul Leon followed in the same strain. Some of these are in­
corporated in the text of the present book, and two of them of
considerable length appear in the essay I later wrote entitled
4
 PREFACE
'Further Recollections ofJamesJoyce'.* The one is a comment
on the Altkatholische Kirche-the church that broke away
from Rome on account of papal infallibility being proclaimed a
dogma-and the other is an account of a performance of
Rossini's Guillaume Tell at the Paris Opera House with Joyce's
admired compatriot, Sullivan, singing the tenor role of Arnold.
James Joyce and the Making rif' Ulysses' was published in Great
Britain by Grayson and Grayson and in the United States by
Harrison Smith and Haas, Inc., simultaneously in 1934. Ever
since its publication it has enjoyed a considerable succes d'estime
and many students of and commentators onJoyce's work have
written to me expressing their appreciation of the book.
Largely for this reason it is offered to the reader in this new
edition practically without revision. In addition to those
publishers acknowledged in my original Author's Note, I am
grateful to The Viking Press, Inc., New York, for permission to
reprint passages from Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man, and to Random House, Inc., for permission to
quote extensively from Ulysses.
FRANK BunGEN
London, 1959

*This essay is reprinted at page 349, by courtesy of the editors of Partisan

Review.

5
 AUTHOR'S NOTE
THE texts of the quotations in the present volume
are from Dubliners (Jonathan Cape,_Ltd., London),
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Jonathan
Cape, Ltd., London), Ulysses (The Odyssey Press,
Hamburg, Paris, Bologna). As regards the book at
present known as Work in Progress, the quotations
from fragments published separately are: Anna Livia
Plurabelle (Faber & Faber, Ltd., London), Haveth
Childers Everywhere (Faber & Faber, Ltd., London),
Two Tales of Shem and'Shaun (Faber & Faber, Ltd.,
London), The Mime of Mick .Nick and the Maggies
(Servire Press, The Hague), and for the complete
Part I and Part III of the same work the text pub­
lished serially by Transition, Paris. I wish to express
my thanks to Mr. Eugenejolas, Editor of Transition,
and to the respective publishers, for permission to
use the texts quoted.
The reader who decides to examine for . himself
more closely the Homeric correspondences and
details of technical construction cannot do better
than consult Mr. Stuart Gilbert's exhaustive work
on that subject, James Joyce's "Ulysses" (Faber &
Faber, London).
F. S. C. B.
Ascona 1933.
Switzerland.
 CHAPTER ONE
ONE afternoon in the early summer of 1918 I was
sitting at my work table in the commercial depart­
ment of the British Consulate in Zurich. Taylor
stood by the window. He had just come in.
"I met James Joyce to-day," he said.
I looked past the dark blue silhouette and profile
of King George V at the yellow, white and blue sky,
green lime trees, tricklingSihl and dark railway sheds.
"Yes," I said.
"Yes. It was in the Stadttheater. Kerridge is
chorus master there, you know. Joyce came in to
ask Kerridge something and then he sat at the
piano and sang to us."
Taylor stretched out hands to a keyboard and
turned his head to an audience.
"He has a fine tenor voice and he knows it."
Taylor sings and is a judge of singing.
"But who is James Joyce?" I asked.
"He's a writer," Taylor said. "You've never
heard of him? People think an awful lot of his book,
A Portrait of the Artist as a roung Man. Do you never
read? Anything but newspapers, I mean?"
He waved his hand in the direction of the office
newspaper files.
"Very little," I said. "And that little not English.
What do you expect? I haven't even time to paint."
"It doesn't matter," said Taylor. " I want you to
meet Joyce."
"Why?"
"Because I think you'd get on well together. Of
 JAMES JOYCE
course he's Irish. You can tell that by his name.
And somehow he hasn't hit it off with the C.G."
I tried without much success to make some sort
of shape out of the material Taylor had given me:
well-known writer, tenor singer, Irishman who
couldn't get on with the Consulate-General. Still,
there was friend Blaise Cendrars, also a well-known
writer. August Suter and I stood godfathers to his
son Odilon m the Mairie ofthe 14th arrondissement.
His polychrome Transsiberien. Now he has lost an
arm in the war. One mustn't label people in
advance. Taylor must have read something
negative in the pause. He broke in on my image
building.
"Don't be lazy and standoffish," he said. "Joyce,
is dining with me at my pension the day after to­
morrow. You can manage that, can't you?"
"I don't see what I have to do with well-known
writers, " I said, "or they with me. Still, I'm free,
and if you think. . . ."
"I do," said Taylor. "Halfpast seven, ifwe don't
go up together."
Taylor was in Zurich on a cultural mission.
Enemy countries were being bombarded with shot
and shell, neutral countries with propaganda of all
sorts designed to prove that it was both interesting
and agreeable to be friends with the triple entente
and its allies. A collection of modern British
pictures had been got together for exhibition in the
principal towns in Switzerland and Taylor was in
charge ofit. The show was good enough ofits kind,
but in the matter of painting the French and
Germans had already queered the pitch. The
French had shown some ofthe dazzling best of their
nineteenth century masters, and the Germans had
sent a less brilliant, but vastly interesting collection,
covering the efforts of a century. On account of
10
 JAMES JOYCE
transport dangers and difficulties, the British collec­
tion was limited to the work of living painters, so
that those who expected to see Constables and
Turners were disappointed. Both Taylor and
myself were painters and both of us were working
for the Ministry of lnformation. My own job was to
survey the Swiss press, translate letters and make
myself generally useful.
Taylor's pension was high up on the Zurichberg
beyond the Fluntern tram terminus. That his guest
was delayed was of no consequence. We sat in the
gravelled garden under a tree, drinking our aperitif
and occasionally striking too short at wasps. The
daylight began to fail. In the restaurant they
switched on the lights. Taylor broke off a sentence
with: "Ah, here's Joyce."
Following Taylor's look I saw a tall slender man
come into the garden through the restaurant.
Swinging a thin cane he walked deliberately down
the steps to the gravelled garden path. He was a
dark mass against the orange light of the restaurant
glass door, but he carried_ his head with the chin
uptilted so that his face collected cool light from the
sky. His walk as he came slowly across to us sug­
gested that o{ a wading heron. The studied deli­
berateness of a latecomer, I thought at first. But
then as he came nearer I saw his heavily glassed
eyes and realised that the transition from light
interior to darkening garden had made him unsure
of a space beset with iron chairs and tables and other
obstacles.
Joyce's greeting to us is of elaborate European
politeness, but his manner I think is distant, his
handshake cool. Close up he looks not so tall though
he is well above average height. The deception is
due to his slender build, his buttoned coat a1;1d
narrow cut trousers. Then he listens to, not looks at,
II
 JAMES JOYCE
his man. The form of his head is the long oval of
heads of the Norman race. His hair is dark enough
to look black in this light. His beard is much
lighter, orangey-brown and cut to a point­
Elizabethan. Behind the powerful lenses of his
spectacles his eyes are a clear, strong blue, but
uncertain in shape and masked in expression. I
notice later that in a moment of suspicion or appre­
hension they become a skyblue glare. The colour
of his face is a bricky red, evenly distributed. .The
high forehead has a forward thrust as it issues from
under the front rank of hair. His jaw is firm and
square, his lips thin and tight, set in a straight line.
Something in Joyce's head suggests to me an
alchemist. It is easy to imagine him moving around
in a room full of furnaces, retorts and books full of
diagrams. And something in his poise suggests a
tall marshfowl, watchful, preoccupied. But I feel
reassured. What I had imagined under a well­
known writer - is not there. He might easily be a
painter.
At dinner Joyce told us of his departure from
the Habsburg Empire after Italy's entrance into the
war and praised the generosity of the Austrian
authorities, who had allowed him to leave the
country and who had even taken his word for the
content.s of his luggage. The war itself and its
progress were left alone by common consent, but
war literature was mentioned, and in this con­
nection Joyce said that the only poem on the
subject that at all interested him was one by the
Viennese poet, Felix Beran1 a friend of his in Zurich.
Und nun ist kommen der Krieg der Krieg
Und nun ist komrilen der Krieg der Krieg
Und nun ist kommen der Krieg
Krieg
Nun sind sie alle Soldaten
12
 JAMES JOYCE
Nun sind sie alle Soldaten
Nun sind sie alle Soldaten
Soldaten
Soldaten miissen sterben
Soldaten miissen �terben
Soldaten miissen sterben
Sterben miissen sie
Wer wird nun kiissen
Wer wird nun kiissen
Wer wird nun kiissen
Meinen weissen Leib

The word "Leib" (body) moved him to enthu­

siasm. It was a sound that created the image of a
body in one unbroken mass. From liquid beginning
it passes over the rich shining double vowel till the
lips close on the final consonant with nothing to
break its blond unity. He spoke ofthe plastic mono­
syllable as a sculptor speaks about a stone.
He asked us ifwe knew the ainting ofWyndham
Lewis. He had read some orLewis's writings and
seen some of his drawings. Neither Taylor nor
myself knew Lewis's work sufficiently well to talk
about it with .assurance. Joyce said he had read a
story of Lewis's that had pleased him. It was the
story Cantelman' s Spring Mate. One of us, it must
have been myself, referred to Shelley's Prometheus
Unbound.
"That seems to me to be the Schwarmerei of a
young Jew," Joyce declared bluntly.
And when I, apropos of some love affair or other,
used the conventional word, heart, he said in the
same tone:
"The seat of the affections lies lower down, I
think."
His meaning, I thought, was clear. He objected
to the sentimental convenient cliche. The allusion
that prompted his remark I learned only some time
later when, at his instance, I read Phineas Fletcher's
13
 JAMES JOYCE

Purple Island or the Isle of Man. The Norfolk Rector

in describing the provinces of the human body says
the following:
The sixt and last town in this region,
With largest stretcht precincts, and compass wide,
Is that where Venus and her wanton sonne
(Her wanton Cupid) will in youth reside.
For though his arrows and his golden bow
On other hills he friendly doth bestow,
Yet here he hides the fire with which each heart doth glow.
So far, in spite of all politeness and conventional
amiability, I had felt aware of something v\'.atchful
and defensive in Joyce's attitude. But on leaving
our host we walked down the hill together to the
Universitatsstrasse where Joyce lived, and I expe­
rienced a sense of relief, due I feel sure to a sudden
expansiveness and cordiality on Joyce's part. He
ask�d about my work, my stay in Zurich, and
suggested future meetings. Some time afterwards
he said to me:
"You remember that evening at Taylor's pension
on the Zurichberg?"
"Yes," I said, "of course I do."
"Well, I went up to Taylor's to dinner with a
mind completely made up that you were to be a
spy sent by the British Consulate to report on me in
connection with my dispute with them."
Joyce laughed a clear long laugh of full enjoy­
ment at his mistake. A laugh is a significant gesture.
Joyce's laughter is free and spontaneous. It is the
kind of laughter called forth by the solemn in . con­
gruities, the monkeyish trickeries and odd mistakes
of social life, but there was no malice in it or real
Schadenfreude. His is the kind of laugh one would
expect to hear if the president of the republic took
the wrong hat, but not if an old man's hat blew off
into the gutter.
 JAMES JOYCE

"And what good reason had you," I asked, "for

coming to the conclusion that I wasn't a spy?"
"Because," said Joyce, "you looked like an
English cricketer out of the W. G. Grace period.
Yes, Arthur Shrewsbury. He was a great bat, but
an awkward-looking tradesman at the wicket."
It was shortly after our meeting at Taylor's pen­
sion that I again met Joyce, by chance this time,
and we strolled through the double avenue of trees
on the Utoquai from Bellevue towards Zurich
Horn. To the left of us were the solid houses of
Zurich burgesses, on our right the lake and on the
far shore of the lake the green slopes and elegant
contours of the Uetliberg ridge.
"I am now writing a book," said Joyce, "based
on the wanderings of Ulysses. The Odyssry, that is
to say, serves me as a ground plan. Only my time is
recent time and all my hero's wanderings take no
more than eighteen hours."
A train of vague thoughts arose in my mind, but
failed to take shape definite enough for any com­
ment. I drew with them in silence the shape of the
Uetliberg-Albis line of hills. The Odyssry for me
was just a long poem that might at any moment be
illustrated by some Royal Academician. I could see
his water-colour Greek heroes, book-opened, in an
Oxford Street bookshop window.
Joyce spoke again more briskly:
"You seem to have read a lot, Mr. Budgen. Do
you know of any complete all-round character
presented by any writer?"
With quick interest I summoned up a whole
population of invented persons. Of the fiction
writers Bal�ac, perhaps, might supply him ? No.
Flaubert? No. Dostoevsky or Tolstoy then ? Their
people are exciting, wonderful, but not complete.
Shakespeare surely. But no, again. The foot-
15
 J AMES J O Y CE
lights, the proscenium arch, the fatal curtain are all
there to present to us not complete, all-round beings,
but only three hours of passionate conflict. I came
to rest on Goethe.
"What about Faust?" I said. And then, as a
second shot "Or Hamlet?"
"Faust !" said Joyce. "Far from being a com­
plete man, he isn't a man at all. Is he an old
man or a young man? Where are his home and
family? We don't know. And he can't be complete
because he's never alone. Mephistopheles is always
hanging round him at his side or heels. • We see a
lot of him, that's all."
It was easy to see the answer in Joyce's mind to
his own question.
"Your complete man in literature is, I suppose,
Ulysses?"
" Yes," said Joyce. " No-age Faust isn't a man.
But you mentioned Hamlet. Hamlet is a human
being, but he is a son only. Ulysses is son to Laertes,
but he is father to Telemachus, husband to Pene­
lope, lover of Calypso, companion in arms of the
Greek warriors around Troy and King of Ithaca.
He was subjected to many trials, but with wisdom
and courage came through them all. Don't forget
that he was a war dodger who tried to evade mili­
tary service by simulating madness. He might never
have taken up arms and gone to Troy, but the
Greek recruiting sergeant was too clever for him
and, while he was ploughing the sands, placed
young Telemachus in front of his plough. But once
at the war the conscientious objector became a
• This sentiment is apparently shared on the other side of the footlights.
Many years afterwards I asked Joyce why his friend Sullivan, the Paris­
Kerry tenor, was so loth to sing in an opera that has become the standby
of the Academic Nationale, and he replied: "That Samson of the land of
Dan has told me that wha't bothers him is not so much the damnation of
Faust as the domination of Mephistopheles."
16
 JAMES J O YCE
jusqu'auboutist. When the others wanted to aban­
don the siege he insisted on staying till Troy should
fall."
I laughed at Ulysses as a leadswinger and Joyce
continued:
"Another thing, the history of Ulysses did not
come to an end when the Trojan war was over. It
began just when the other Greek heroes went back
to live the rest of their lives in peace. And then"­
Joyce laughed-"he was the first gentleman in
Europe. When he advanced, naked, to meet the
young princess he hid from her maidenly eyes the
pa.rt� that mattered of his brine-soaked, barnacle­
encrusted body. He was an inventor too. The tank
is his creation. Wooden horse or iron box-it doesn't
matter. They are both shells containing armed
warriors."
History repeats itself. The inventor of the tank
also found his Ajax at the War Office in: the shape of
Lord Kitchener.
It seems to me to be significant that Joyce should
talk to me first of the principal character in his
book and only later of the marufold devices through
which he presented him. If the two elements of
character and material can be separated this is the
order in which he would put them. On the home
stretch back to Bellevue a question grew in my
mind.
"What do you mean," I said, "by a complete
man? For example, if a sculptor makes a figure of
a man then that man is all-round, three-dimen­
sional, but not necessarily complete in the sense of
being ideal. All human bodies are imperfect,
limited in some way, human beings too. Now your
Ulysses . . ."
"He is b oth," said Joyce. "I see him from all
sides, and therefore he is all-round in the sense of
17
 JA MES J O Y C E
your sculptor's figure. But he is a complete man
as well-a good man. At any rate, that is what I
intend that he shall be."
The talk turned on music, and I mentioned that
Taylor had heard him singing in the Stadttheater.
"Yes, I remember," said Joyce. "I went there
to ask Kerridge something about the disposition of
the instruments in the orchestra, and to put him up
to some of the commoner mistakes his chorus was
likely to make in singing Italian. What I sang was
the tenor Romanza 'Amor Ti Vieta' from Gior­
dano's Fedora. I wanted to show the vocal necessity
for putting an atonic vowel between two consonants.
Listen."
And he began to sing :
"Amor ti vieta di non amar la mantua lieve che
mi respin_ge.''
He turned to me again:
"You hear," he said. "It would be impossible to
sing that 'respinge' without interpolating a vowel
breath between the 'n' and the 'g'."
When I first called on Joyce and his family they
were living at No. 3 8 · Universitatsstrasse. There
were two guests besides myself It was after these
had gone and Joyce had asked me to stay for a
final half-hour's chat that we fell to talking about
religion. Being an orthodox agnostic I saw nothing
illogical in admitting that what are called miracles
might occur. I had no satisfactory evidence that
any ever had occurred, but on my limited experi­
ence I felt I couldn't rule them out. Perhaps I
didn't succeed in defining my position too well, for
when I rose to go Joyce laughed and said:
"You are really more a believer than is many a
good Catholic."
The next day I found a packet and a letter
18
 JAME S JOY C E
awaiting me in my little room in the Schipfe. The
packet contained a copy of A Portrait of the Artist
as a Young Man and the letter extracts from press
notices of A Portrait of the Artist, Dubliners and Exiles.
I read the book and then the praises of Ezra Pound,
H. G. Wells and others, quoted on the many­
coloured leaflets. H. G. Wells wrote: "Its claim
to be literature is as good as the claim of the last
book of Gulliver's Travels. . . . Like Swift and
another living Irish writer, Mr. Joyce has a cloacal
obsession . . . . Like some of the best novels in the
world, it is the story of an education . . . . One
conversation in this book is a superb success. I
write with all due deliberation that Sterne himself
could not have done it better." And Ezra Pound
and a dozen others to the same purpose, each in
his own way. I remember very well my own
impression. The affirmative young man, the
terror-stricken and suffering adolescent were but
timebound phases of a personality the essence of
which was revealed in the boy Stephen Dedalus.
He is like a young inquisitive cat taking stock of the
world and of himself: climbing, hiding, testing
his claws. This bold, sensitive, tenacious, clear­
seeing boy is the essential artist. There comes a
moment when hostile forces--cramping poverty
and the tyrannies of Church, nation and family­
threaten him with loss of freedom, with extinction
as an artist, and he must mobilise all his forces of
defence and attack to save himself. "Silence, exile
and cunning," says Stephen himself, and he uses
those arms and more besides before the battle is
won.
A cold wind was blowing when I met Joyce one
evening on the Bahnhofstrasse. The brown overcoat
buttoned up to his chin lent him a somewhat mili­
tary appearance.
19
 JAMES JOYCE

"I'm glad you liked the 'Portrait', , , said Joyce.

I had returned the book with a letter recording
some of my impressions of it.
"That simile of yours, 'a young cat sharpening his
claws on the tree of life,' seems to me to be very
just applied to young Stephen."
I enquired about Ulysses. Was it progressing?
"I have been working hard on it- all day," said
Joyce.
"Does that mean that you have written a great
deal?" I said.
"Two sentences," said Joyce.
I looked sideways but Joyce was not smiling. I
thought of Flaubert.
"You have been seeking the mot juste?" I said.
"No," said Joyce. "I have the words already. What
I am seeking is the perfect order of words in the
sentence. There is an order in every way appro­
priate. I think I have it."
"What are the words?" I asked.
"I believe I told you;'' said joyce, "that my book
is a modern Odyssey. Every episode in it corre­
sponds to an adventure of Ulysses. I am now
writing the Lestrygonians episode, which corresponds
to the adventure of Ulysses with the cannibals. My
hero is going to lunch. But there is . a seduction
motive in the Odyssey, the cannibal king's daughter.
Seduction appears in my book as women's silk
petticoats hangmg in a shop window. The words
through which I express the effect of it on my
hungry hero are: 'Perfume of embraces all him
assailed. With hungered flesh obscurely, he mutely
craved to adore.' You can see for yourself in how
many different ways they might be ai:ranged."
A painter is, perhaps, more originality proof than
any other artist, seeing that all recent experimental
innovations in the arts have first been tried out on
20
 J AMES JOYCE
his own. And many a painter can labour for a day
or for many days on one or two square inches of
canvas so that labour expended on achieving
precious material is not likely to surprise him.
What impressed me, I remember, when Joyce
repeated the words of Bloom's hungrily abject
amorousness to me, was neither the originality of
the words themselves nor the labour expended on
composing them. It was the sense they gave me
that a new province of material had been found.
Where that province lay I could not guess, but as
our talk proceeded Joyce spoke of it himself without
question of mine. We were by this time sitting in
the Astoria Cafe.
"Among other things," he said, " my book is. the
epic of the human body. The only man I know
who has attempted the same thing is Phineas
Fletcher. But then his Purple Island is purely de­
scriptive, a kind of coloured anatomical chart of
the human body. In my book the body lives in and
moves through space and is the home of a full
human personality. The words I write are adapted
to express first one of its functions then another.
In Lestrygonians the stomach dominates and the
rhythm of the episode is that of the peristaltic
movement."
"But the minds, the thoughts of the characters,"
I began.
"If they had no body they would have no mind,"
said Joyce. "It's all one. Walking towards his
lunch my hero, Leopold Bloom, thinks of his wife,
and says to himself, 'Molly's legs are out of plumb.'
At another time of day he might have expressed the
same thought without any underthought of food.
But I want the reader to understand always through
suggestion rather than direct statement."
"That's the painter's form of leverage," I said.
21
 JAMES JOYCE

We talked of words again, and I mentioned one

that had always pleased me in its shape and colour.
It was Chatterton's "acale" for freeze.
"It is a good word," said Joyce. "I shall probably
use it."
He does use it. The word occurs in The Oxen of
the Sun episode of Ulysses in a passage written in
early English, describin� the death and pµrial of_
Bloom's son Rudolph : '· . . . and as he was minded
of his good lady Marion that had borne him an
only manchild which on his eleventh day on live
had died and no man of art could save so dark is
destiny. And she was wondrous stricken of heart for
that evil hap and for his burial did him on a fair
corselet of lamb's wool, the flower of the flock, lest
he might perish utterly and lie akeled . . . ."
In leavmg the cafe I asked Joyce how long he had
been working on Ulysses.
"About five years," he said . "But in a sense all
my life . "
"Some of your contemporaries," I said, "think
two books a year an average output."
"Yes," said Joyce. "But how do they do it? They
talk them into a typewriter. I feel quite capable
of doing that if I wanted to do it. But what's the
use? It isn't worth doing."

22
 CHAPTER TWO
THE town clusters round the horseshoe end of the
lake. Bright villages, Zollikon, Kilchberg, Rusch­
likon, Erlenbach, flicker along its shores. The
Glarus mountains rise orange-white in the distance.
Supple contours of hills accompany the lake's flight
south-eastward. Stand on the Quaibriicke on a
summer day, and the lake, tilled slopes, villages
and far-off mountains, absorbed by the air, become
unsubstantial colour essences, but when the Fohn
wind blows, bringing malaise, migraine or exhilara­
tion to the Ziiricher, the high hills on the right
move towards the town, heavy, hard-featured, in
sullen green and leaden ultramarine. Under the
Quaibriicke the Limmat runs out of the overfull
lake silkily and swiftly through the town. Big
Snake (Lindermage) is the name under which the
Helvetians and Alemannen veiled her divinity,
and that is her name to this day. The sons of her
right and left bank hug tightly the mother river.
Up the steep· right bank the houses rise thickly,
tier on tier, to the pine woods. The left bank goes
flatly away over the shallow Sihl to the working­
class suburbs of Aussersihl. Tucked away in their
sheds near the bridge are the slim shells of See­
club eights and fours. The Tonhalle brightens
the quai on the left bank with its minarets. Out of
the .dense mass of the town rise the heavy twin
towers of the Grossmiinste1 , built by Charlemagne
over the graves of SS. Felix and Regula (Prosperity
and Order), the slender spire of the Fraumiinster,
23
 JAMES JOYCE
the clocktower of the Peterskirche, the yellow
renaissance fa<;ade of the Polytechnic, and the
white walls and tower of the university. The
Stadttheater stands on the Utoquai, right bank of
the Limmat, a stone's throw from the lake. There
is an open space in front of it whereon, every third
Monday in April, is lit the Beltane fire of Zurich.
"Sechselauten," they call the feast, and the name of
the demon of winter is the "Bogg." Guildsmen in
burnous, in rococo plumed hat and gay cloak,
gallop round the bonfire of the winter bogeyman.
And there is no restriction, except that of good
manners, placed upon them who want to drown
t1:e memory of the winter and greet the spring in
wme.
From Zollikon, Meilen, Herrliberg, down the
Seefeldstrasse, past the Stadttheater and the place
where they burn the Bogg in spring, come in
autumn, heavy country carts laden each with an
immense barrel made gay with country flowers.
The barrels contain Sauser, new wine, still fer­
menting, from the lakeside vineyards. There is
no drink more full of uplift and downfall than
Sauser, but it must be, as they say, "im Stadium,"
for it soon loses its quality. Therefore, while the elder
brothers await the precious beverage in their fa­
vourite Wirtschafts in town, energetic youth goes out
along the lake to drink it at the source. From
village to village they go on their Sauserbummel,
and from vintage to vintage as far as their legs will
carry them.
The earliest Ziirichers lived in stilthouses on the
lake where now the roadmaker has effaced their
marshy no-man's-land. Helvetians made them­
selves a strong place on the left bank of the Limmat;
Romans and Alemannen took it in turn; Charle­
magne dispensed justice there, and there the
24
 JAMES JOYCE

Ziirichers of 1898 swore allegiance to their brand­

new constitution. But now the Lindenhof is a
pleasant grove of lime trees garnished with con­
venient seats on which it is very pleasant to sit on
summer evenings with Brissago and Neue Zurcher
,Zeitung. The Guilds, whose young men now head the
Sechselaute procession and gallop round the Beltane
fire, shared the rule of the town for three hundred
years with aristocrat and merchant. They stood by
Zwingli in the Reformation and fought at his side
at Kappel, where the militant reformer fell, sword
in hand. That cross-hilted sword now lies in the
Landesmuseum in a glass case. Protestant Zilrich
was enriched by the arts of Locarner and Huguenot
weaver. They brought silk to Zurich as the
Huguenot brought silk to London and poplin
to Dublin. Unemployed worker and work-despising
aristocrat combined in renaissance Zilrich to sell
their strong arms for what they would fetch to
foreign princes at war. Soldner mercenaries:
"Wir zogen in das Feld." The conscience of the
burgess, loss to the state, with Zwingli as spearhead
of their attack, put an end to the inexpedient
commerce in armed fighting men. The trade of
the Lanzknecht came to an end, but his military
virtue is still admired. Hodler has celebrated in
paint the retreat of the Lanzknechte from Marig­
nano. Massena crushed Suvaroff at Zurich when
the French Revolution was making new laws and
constitutions for Europe, and humane Lavater,
admired by Blake, fell while succouring the wounded
when the soldiers of the year VI took the town.
Giants of German literature, Klopstock, Wieland,
Goethe, Kleist, knew Zurich and praised her.
Wozzeck's poet, in love with death, quitted life
with the image of Zurich in his eyes. Wagner
roamed the shores of the lake, head full of harmonies
25
 JAMES JOYCE
of Tristan and Isolde. "Tristan's Ehre." None
knew land, people and legend better than the
Zuricher, Gottfried Keller, poet, novelist and
state secretary. He wrote of his townsmen with
shrewd wit and profound humanity. Nietzsche
proclaimed that Swiss a master among prose
writers. His seat and table are piously preserved
in the "Apfelkammer." Conrad Ferdinand Meyer
wrote his novels and poems in quiet Kilchberg.
Pestalozzi was Zurich born and bred. His Argovian
farm has been bought with the pennies of Swiss
school children.
In Meilen lives Dr. C. G. Jung, curer of sick and
harassed souls. He added to the doctrine of psycho­
analysis, and made the Zurich school of adepts in
that science. The studio of my friend August
Suter, sculptor, stands in the neighbouring village
of Zollikon. He has made a series of figures for the
Amtshauser in Zurich. Harmoniously yoked to his
plastic vision are the forces of temperament and
high intelligence. Now he has made for Liestal,
native town of Carl Spitteler, poet of Prometheus,
a Prometheus with counselling angel in bronze­
the poet's vision made three-dimensional. Architect
Karl Moser built the art gallery and the university.
Crowds pack the aula to hear Professor Fleiner on
const1tut10nal history, so rare it is that so much
learning and sanity are served by such persuasive
eloquence. The Tonhalle overlooks the lake. When
Ferruccio Busoni is to play he walks thither from
the Bahnhof buffet in the company of an enormous
hound. Citizen and stranger throng the Bahnhof­
strasse on their evening promenade. All know him
and his errand, and respect his solitude. D' Albert
is a citizen of Zurich and plays in the Tonhalle.
Clouds are descending upon the spirit of Lehm­
bruck, most sensitive of German sculptors, where
26
 JAMES JOYCE

he works in the Seefeldstrasse. The Dadaists are

planning yet another revolution in the arts over
Sprungli's teashop. The waiter at the Odeon
will tell you discreetly which of the guests is Leon­
hard Frank, famous for Der Mensch ist Gut. He will
tell you too where sat Lenin, calmly, confidently
awaiting the call that came in 1 9 1 7. Vladimir
Ilytch was a silent listener to hot word battles they
say, here and zur Linde, but his was the last word
when the conflict of half-truths had shaped the con­
clusion he desired. To another guest of Zurich,
Willy Munzenberg, legend ascribes the organisation
of Lenin's departure in the famous locked train.
Munzenberg organised his own departure from
Germany just as efficiently and his Mercedes
Luxuswagen has been seen waiting for its master
outside the Casino de Paris.
There is no street in London that can equal the
Bahnhofstrasse for metropolitan smartness. . But
let the smart shops and broad pavements go as a
matter of course. Its crowning glory is its avenue
of lime trees that on summer evenings enrich the
air with a delicious scent of lime blossom. Gottfried
Keller celebrated perhaps just these lime trees in one
of his loveliest verses. The trams that pass on the
other side of the tree trunks are painted bright
cobalt blue and white, colours of the town of
Zurich, colours of the Greek flag, colours of the
covers of Ulysses. No town in Europe is more cosmo­
politan than Zurich in war time, and of all streets in
Zurich the Bahnhofstrasse is the most cosmopolitan.
And it is everybody's promenade, stranger and
citizen, millionaire silk merchant and Aussersihl
proletarian. Conspicuous among the business
foreigners, legitimate and illegitimate, among the
spies and propagandists, deserters and refractaires 1
poor and rich, were a number of young men of
27
 J AMES J OYCE
olive complexion, black hair and assured mien,
wearing khaki gaberdine suits tightly and co­
quettishly cut. They were well nourished, for the
half-belt at the back of their coats was overlapped
in both senses by a roll of fat. They puzzled an
observer of social phenomena.
"Who are these people?" I asked of a Zuricher.
"They are garlic millionaires from the Balkan
States," he said promptly.
At the lake end of the Bahnhofstrasse is visible the
hotel Baur au Lac, first hotel in Zurich. Mrs.
MacCormick has a suite of rooms there. She is
daughter of a king, an oil king, born Edith Rocke­
feller, and one of the richest women in the world,
therefore in Zurich supremely rich. Fantastic,
distinguished, benevolent, she walks the town
scattering right and left charities, houses and
yachts. She is a believer in psychoanalysis and all
its prophets and disciples, and did much to spread
a taste for its culture. She has founded the Mac­
Cormick Stiftung, which will acquire the pictures
of the impecunious painter if a committee considers
them worthy. The fund should be for Zurich
painters only, but as I am an Anglo-Saxon, needy,
and my work not unworthy, I am allowed to
participate. Mr. Rawson, a friend of Joyce, taught
Mr. MacCormick to whistle "It ain't gonna waltza
no more."
Here and there about the town one sees a tall
bearded man of royal carriage. An exiled king?
They are becoming common. No, a reigning
monarch. His realm is called the "Meierei," a grill­
room in Niederdorf, where every week in their day
Keller and Bocklin met. His name is Oomjan. With
kingly air he asks if the beefsteak grilled by him is to
his guest's liking and, sure of the enthusiastic ''Ja,"
passes on to another table. Perfection must please.
28
 JAMES J O Y CE
"I should like to go to England," said a Ziiricher
to me. "The beefsteaks there must be wonderful."
"Stay in Zurich," I counselled him. "In the
world are no better beefsteaks than those grilled
by Oom Jan in the Meierei."
I heard with grief of the death of that great
Dutchman. Ou sont les bifteks d'antan ?
Robed in fine linen, with canary gloves and
patent leather shoes, another Dutchman walks the
town, sometimes in the cornpany of James Joyce.
He is dentist, cinema producer, dealer in shirt­
waists, synthetic pearls and synthetic bouillon.
His name is Juda Devries, alias Joe Martin, alias
Jules Moreau. He has written a film scenario
entitled Wine, Woman and Song, and he writes letters
on pink notepaper headed with the crossed flags
of the allied nations. His father is the venerable
gynrecologist of Amsterdam. Joyce was once
instrumental in getting him out ofjail into hospital,
and he, being as ingenious as he was enterprising,
made a wooden money-box in the form of a Bible
for his serviable friend. It bore, by way of title,
"My First Success," by James Joyce. One time
professor in the higher school of commerce in
Vienna, Sigmund Feilbogen haunts the Cafe des
Banques, with an eartrumpet which }_le orients and
occidents night and day to catch rumours of peace
anywhere at any hour. Butcher Lenz, in girth
surpassing Velasquez's actor, takes up all the
platform of a tram designed for five and a conduc­
tor. L'homme qui rit walks round the bourse with
a copious English newspaper held up to his face.
He has a lion's mouth that stretches from ear to
ear. In the Olivenbaum restaurant a swarthy,
diminutive young man, his breast pocket full of
pens and pencils, evidently a Levantine, goes from
one Zurich working-man to the other talking to
29
 JAMES JOYCE

them all with an air of authority, making notes the

while with one of his fountain pens. He doesn't
look like a trade union leader, and is not a working­
class party leader. Is he tallyman or conspirator?
But you can't conspire in crowded teetotal restaur­
ants, and the tallyman comes, according to tradi­
tion, on the family doorstep. We gave it up. "He's
Fiillfederowski, .and up to some mischief," said Suter.
Occasionally during the day, but for sure at about
six o'clock in the evening, from the corner of the
Usteristrasse to the Paradeplatz, a young man,
shoulders bunched, oblivious of his surroundings,
walks with long eager strides, and now and then
breaks out into a stiff-legged trot. He has the great
dark eyes of a sensitive intelligent deer and the
combative jaw of a terrier. Steadily marching
Eidgenossen wonder who the preoccupied young man
may be. It is my chief. Often his staff gathers at
the corner of the street to watch with wonder his
erratic progress lakewards. All the British soldiers
in khaki doing light work in the Consulate are
invalided out of Germany in exchange for an
equal number of Germans out of British hospitals
and prison camps. Whitcomb is a Gloucestershire
man badly knocked about at Ypres. He attends a
machine in a coal mine in South Wales and in his
spare time carves figures in wood. Tennant is one
of the hundred and fifty lucky ones of the South
African brigade to escape out of Delville Wood
with their lives. All through the war the newspaper
seller outside the central railway station, his chest
plastered with telegrams of all nations, Reuter,
Wolff, Havas, Stefani-pay your money and take
your choice�ried monotonously: "Ziirizitig Extra­
blatt !" with Vierwaldstatter je m'en foutisme.
Switzerland in war time had some of the character
of a beleaguered town, although all belligerents
30
 JAM ES J OY C E
found it expedient to respect her neutrality. All
foreign and overseas supplies had to be borne over
the territories of nations at war, and these could
give only a minimum of transport material. The
produce of Swiss orchards and pastures had to be
bartered for the indispensable supplies of coal and
iron for her railways and industries. This painful
necessity was mother to the electrification of the
federal railway system, carried through with resolute
efficiency as soon as the war was over. "Moppa
necessity mother of injuns." Life was a thing of
Ersatz and Zusatz and doing without. Bread was
rationed to a minimum. There was a great planting
of maize and potatoes all along the lake shore. The
potato crop failed. Boiled chestnuts became a
staple dish. Frogs' legs appeared on meatless days.
Saccharine pills replaced the usual sugar-lumps
alongside the coffee cup. Next to every item on the
menu stood a warning numeral and fraction. This
was the amount of fat involved in the dish, and the
waitress tore the like ciphers off the fat card. Who
counted them afterwards? Butter was a grievous
question. It was debated with no less ardour than
the war situation, politics and psychoanalysis.
About a quarter of a pound a month was our
ration. Not worth scraping or saving, thought
some of us, and we ingeniously contrived to eat our
ration on the first day so that for the rest of the
month we had neither butter nor worry. Irksome
all this, and for the weak and sick probably dis­
tressing, but those of us who could put up with
what came along suffered no real harm.
The perpetual neutrality of Switzerland was
guaranteed by all the powers, but so was that of
Belgium. And scraps of paper were at a discount
at the time. Anyway, perpetual neutrality was
merely an extra piece of frontier to be defended.
31
 JAMES JOYCE

All frontiers and fortresses had to be manned, a

task which involved keeping the fighting forces of
the country on a war footing. There was a perpetual
ebb and flow of grey blue men of all military ages
between the interior and the frontiers. One look
at the map of Europe is enough to convince the
intuitive observer that Switzerland is a sceptical
country. It is a small country with a long frontier
and a long memory. At every point of the compass
stands a powerful and dangerous neighbour. During
the war all Swiss talked war strategy and politics,
and in general all were pacifists. The working class
of Switzerland, outnumbered as it is by bourgeois
and peasants, is inclined to be revolutionary in the
Central European manner. Their pacifism was of
a plague on both your houses kind. Swiss pacifism
did not rule out preference, and preference took
the line of language cleavage, with this modifica­
tion, that the West Swiss, French-speaking, were
more pro-French than the German-speaking Swiss
were pro-German. This was expressed in popular
wit: "Paris wants to make peace, but Lausanne
won't hear of it." The sympathy of the German­
speaking Swiss for the countries nearest of kin was
tempered by a jealous fear of the over-mighty
neighbour. I always felt that the Swiss knew the
Germans more intimately than we. In his hostile
moments the German is to .him a "chaibe Schwob,"
in which phrase, with appropriate intonation, he
expresses his resentment and mistrust for the rich,
pushing and cunning neighbour. To the English­
man the Germans were Huns, a numberless horde
of cruel and rapacious marauders coming from a
far-off place, or (to the soldiers in the trenches) they
were Jerry or Fritz, just as he was Tommy or
Taffy, Jock or Pat. This was trade union familiarity.
When the Frenchman said "Boche," the term
32
 JAMES J OYCE
indicated a rude uncultivated lout. The patriotism
of the Swiss was intense, but not aggressive. Their
perpetual neutrality barred all thought of territorial
expansion, but there was in them a certain tendency
to spiritual expansionism. The world should. admire
and copy their admirable institutions. Expressed
with over-emphasis in a students' debate : "Wir
mussen die ganze \Velt helvetisiercn."
There are probably more local differences of
character in Switzerland than in most countries.
Take the two opposite numbers, the Zuricher and
the Bas_ler. The Ziiricher is robust, independent,
optimistic, go-ahead. Unlike the Basler, he has his
own hinterland. Basel is a frontier town, hemmed
in on two sides by Alsace and the Grand Duchy of
Baden, and frontier towns have always their own
state of nerves, racial and cultural admixtures, and
the many customs barriers cramp their economic
style. Therefore the Basler is sceptical, ironical,
watchful. And no wonder, for in Basel the war
was at the gates. Cannonades on Hartmannsweiler
Kopf and on the bridgehead at St. Louis rattled
the Basler's windows, and from his streets he could
see the shrapnel of anti-aircraft guns bursting and
their cotton-wool clouds drifting over his town.
The Zuricher could rarely hear cannonades, and
there were no customs barriers at the gates of his
town. Owing to its commercial eminence and its
distance from inconvenient and dangerous frontiers,
Zurich was one of the most cosmopolitan towns in
Europe during the war. I once heard that the
floating population of foreigners was equal to forty
per cent of the native population. Any big town
with foreign business relations and a central position
has its quota of foreign business men, agents,
travellers and so on. But the great mass of foreign
re'>idents in Zurich in war time was made up of
33
 JAMES JOYCE
deserters, refractaires, and political agents of all
kinds, and the legitimate business agent was
reinforced by a much larger element whose house
of business was any quiet comer of any convenient
cafe on the Bahnhofstrasse, and whose business
consisted in trading in contravention of war time
regulations. Zurich was the Schiebers' paradise,
and the headquarters of spies of all nations. The
trade of the spy seems to me to be no worse than
that of the combatant soldier. It has always been
a part of war-time service as essential as the firing
of a gun, or the making of a bullet, or the making
of bread for the man who makes the bullet or for
the man who fires it. But the awkward thing in a
town like Zurich is that when spies are around in
great numbers nobody knows who is a spy and
who isn't, with the result that everybody is likely
to think that everybody else i.s a spy unless there is
clear evidence to the contrary. One harmless
instance of this distorting spy atmosphere is Joyce's
mistaking me for a Consular agent. Austrian spies
"Ii.ad watched his movements in his earlier Zurich
days.
Another category of foreigners were those on
neutral soil for the purpose of national propaganda.
The Ministry of Information, in which I was
employed at the time I met Joyce, was an institution
for the spread of British propaganda in . neutral
countries. They found me unemployed in Zurich
and gave me a job. The idea was to convince the
Swiss that it was pleasanter and more profitable
to be friends with the Allies than with the Germans.
The printed word was our principal instrument.
There was a rare scramble amongst all .belligerent
propaganda agencies for Swiss newsprint. As they
were debarred from founding newspapers them­
selves, the next best thing for the foreign propa-
34
 JAMES JOY C E
gandists was to get as much space as possible in
newspapers already existing. It was generally
believed that the ,Zurich Post was under German
control. Whether from sympathy or interest, it was
certainly Germanophile. The newsvendors in their
local patois called it the ",Zuri Boche," and the
passer-by smiled approval. Generally speaking,
however, the method was to send out articles and
pars of all kinds, and on their own merit, or with
the aid of a friend at court, they would usually
find a place in some paper or the other. To aid
us in our enterprise the M. of I. in London sent us
from time to time big bundles ofarticles written some­
where in Whitehall or the Strand. One of the best
was a carefullywritten study on bent wood furniture,
but unfortunately we couldn't place it. Our
difficulty was that if we wanted an English news­
paper more or less up-to-date we had to go and
buy it at the station kiosk like anybody else. Still,
considering the lack of straw, our output of bricks
was as good as that of the rival firms. France and
Germany had the best of the cultural propaganda.
Germany scored heavily with music, and France
with the pictorial and plastic arts. They had the
cards and were in a position to play them. The
only attempt to make the Swiss public acquainted
with English dramatic art in the English tongue
was made by Joyce himself who, with the assistance
of Mr. and Mrs. Claude Sykes, founded the English
Players.
Rising steeply and elegantly out of the Limmat
there is a flight of seventeenth-century houses, one
of the architectural glories of the town. It is called
the Schipfe and is now, I understand, condemned
by a progressive municipality. I had a top room
in the corner house, No. 23 . Joyce had a flat in the
Universitatsstrasse. From No. 3 8, where he lived
35
 JAMES JOYCE

when I first met him, he soon moved to No. 29

over the way, to remain there until he left for
Trieste at the end of 1 9 1 9. For some reason that
she could never successfully define, my landlady,
a Bavarian woman married to a Liechtensteiner
stonemason, was afraid of Joyce. The chorus girls
in the Stadttheater were more definite. They
nicknamed him "Herr Satan." One evening on
my return from the consulate she handed me a
small parcel.
"Your friend, the tall gentleman with the beard,
left this for you," she said with awe.
It contained Dubliners and those copies of the
Little Review in which fragments of Ulysses had
appeared. Six episodes were there. These were
to be followed by another six, and then the Little
Review was to fall beneath the effective wrath of
outraged American propriety. The Nausikaa episode
was more than the American censor could stand.
That which to do is no crime, although by many
serious judges thought inadvisable, that which
may be discussed by word of mouth, frivolously or
seriously according to taste, may not in print be
hinted at, such potency for corruption resides,
apparently, in the written word.
Joyce's flat was in a modernish house of no
particular character. Mrs. Joyce complained that a
superfluity of mice and a shortage of culinary
utensils cramped her style in the kitchen, but, apart
from that, it seemed to me not a bad apartment as
apartments go. Joyce's own furniture was, of course,
left in Trieste. At the door of the flat one heard the
clear shapes and metallic tones of the Italian
language. Italian was the house language, and for
the children, Giorgio and Lucia, the mother tongue.
At that time they spoke English hardly at all and in
talking to each other used mainly the Zi.irich
36
 JAMES JOYCE

dialect, Zuridiitsch. In about a year at school in

Zurich they had learned it, so astonishingly quick
are the young on the linguistic uptake. Lucia was a
dark-haired, blue-eyed girl, slenderly and elegantly
built ; Giorgio a dark boy, built on more powerful
lines. He was an excellent swimmer, champion at
his age amongst Zurich schoolboys over a distance
of two miles. Such were his natural aptitudes for
this exercise that two or three years later in Paris
he proposed entering for the annual traversie de Paris
from Charenton to Auteuil. Mrs. Joyce was a stately
presence, but what most impressed on acquaintance
was her absolute independence. Her judgments of
men and things were swift and forthright and pro­
ceeded from a scale of values entirely personal, un­
imitated, unmodified. In whatever mood she spoke
it was with that rich, agreeable voice that seems to
be the birthright of Irish women. Generally at the
time I arrived it was the children's bedtime. To
Giorgio was said, "Porta del lcgno" ; to Lucia,
"Vade a letto" ; and when Mrs. Joyce came in with
a carafe of the always desirable Fendant we were
already talking, usually about Joyce's Ulysses.
"Now that's too bad," said Mrs. Joyce, as she set
down the wine. "And is he talking to you again
about that old book of his, Mr. Budgen? I don't
know how you stand it. Jim, you ought not to do it.
You'll bore Mr. Budgen stiff."
Any disparaging remarks of Mrs. Joyce about
Ulysses always made Joyce's eyes glitter with sup­
pressed laughter. He protested mildly.
"If I bore Budgen," he said, "he must tell me.
But he has the advantage of me. He can understand
and talk about my book, but I don't understand and
can't talk about painting."
Mrs. Joyce turned to me in the same vein of
mocking disparagement.
37
 JAMES JOYCE

"What do you think, Mr. Budgen, of a book with

a big, fat, horrible married woman as . the heroine?
Mollie Bloom!"
I said I thought there was nothing wrong with
being fat and married. Anyway a fat, married
woman is a change from the sylph-like sweethearts
we usually read about.
Strolling through the street one day Joyce laughed
and said to me:
"Some people were up at our flat last night, and
we were talking about Irish wit and humour. And
this morning my wife said to me, 'What is all this
about Irish wit and humour? Have we any book i11
the house with any of it in? I'd like to read a page
or two.' "
Joyce and his family settled in Zurich right away
on coming from Austria, and stayed there about
four years. From Basel I came to Zurich and out­
stayed Joyce there for the greater part of a year.
Their flat in 29 Universitatsstrasse was the fourth of
their Zurich habitations. Previously they had lived
in the Seefeldstrasse, sharing a flat first with Philip
Jarnach, Busoni's secretary and assistant Kapell­
meister at the Stadttheater and later the same flat
with Charlotte Sauermann, one of the leading
sopranos of the Ziirkh opera. We both watched the
fortunes of war change for the combatants (Joyce
more objectively than I), celebrated the armistice,
experienced the grippe epidemic, the Swiss general
strike of 1 91 8, many Fohn winds, much good wine
(for noble Turricum, in spite ofrationing, abounded
in all manner of goodly merchandise) and many
fluctuations of our own personal fortunes. And it
was in Athens on the Limmat that Joyce wrote the
half of Ulysses.

38
 CHAPTER THREE
I SAT up reading the first three episodes of Ulysses in
the Little Review. Joyce wanted them to pass on to
someone else. These three episodes form an intro­
duction to the main theme equivalent to the first
books of the Odyssey wherein the situation in the
household of Ulysses is described and young Tele­
machus sets forth to gain news of his father. The
Telemachus of Joyce's book is Stephen Dedalus,
whose childhood, boyhood and adolescence are
narrated in A Portrait of the Artist as a Toung Man.
From the date of the last entry in Stephen's diary
at the end of A Portrait of the Artist to the beginning
of Ulysses there is a gap of about six months.
Stephen has been in Paris. A telegram called him
back to the bedside of his dying mother. She died,
and now he is living in the Martello tower at
Sandycove with his friend, Buck Mulligan, a
medical student. They pay twelve pounds a year
rent for the tower to the Secretary of State for War.
Every reader of Ulysses is captivated from the start
with the wit and high spirits of Buck Mulligan, but
there is an atmosphere of hostility between him and
Stephen. He reproaches Stephen with failing to
humour his mother's last wish and pray at her bed­
side, and criticises generally "the cursed Jesuit
strain" in him. Stephen resents the native and
habitual mockery of the Buck. He instances the
overheard remark of Mulligan to his aunt: "O, it's
only Dedalus whose mother is beastly dead." In
reality, however, it is not one remark or another
39
 JAMES JOYCE
that hurts him, but it is that Mulligan is of "the
brood of mockers" whose mockery is a blighting
negative force. They have a guest in the tower,
Haines, an Englishman-a somewhat dull, com­
placent individual, but fairminded and, like many
Englishmen, a collector of Irish folklore. Haines had
dreamed of a black panther during the night and
his nightmare cries had waked Stephen.
The action that takes place is of the simplest kind.
Just out of b ed, Mulligan and Stephen appear on
the gun platform of the tower. Mulligan shaves
while Stephen looks on. They talk and in their talk
their conflict of character is revealed. Then they go
down into the tower and Mulligan prepares the
breakfast of rashers, eggs and tea for them and for
their Sassenach guest. After breakfast they go to
the forty-foot hole to bathe. Mulligan strips and
goes in at once. The prudent Haines sits on a rock
smoking a cigarette and waiting for his breakfast to
go down. Stephen doesn't bathe at all. Mulligan
asks for the key of the tower and of Stephen's
remaining fourpence twopence, for a pint . . Stephen
throws the key and the coppers on Mulligan's shirt,
turns and walks away. He feels that the end of his
friendship with Mulligan is near. He resolves not to
sleep in the tower another night and turns away
from the seated Haines and the swimmer out in the
sea, uttering to himself the word, "Usurper."
The real action takes place within the mind and
conscience of Stephen. His mother had begged hitn
on her deathbed to kneel and pray for her. He
refused and she died without the comfort of his
prayers. It is a good thing to renounce a corrupting
and destroying doctrine, and a good thing to solace
the last hours of a sick mother. There would be no
conflict in life at all if the choice of action lay always
between good and evil. Stephen chooses what seems
40
 JAMES J OYCE

to him to be the greater good. If offered the thoice

again he would choose the same, but that he chose
rightly fails to shield him against remorse of
conscience-his "Agenbite oflnwit." One brought
up in an atmosphere of rationalist indifferenti.sm
might have prayed and come to no harm, but
Stephen was an ardent believer and holds his
freedom only by dint of constant combat. He has a
theologian's logic and a churchman's conscience. To
pray or not to pray is a grievous question. If he
refuses he must be tortured; if he consents he is lost.
That is to say, he loses his feeling of integrity, his
sense of direction. He knows too well the mysterious
potency of words and gestures "behind which are
massed twenty centuries of authority and venera­
tion." He has proclaimed his freedom, but he is not
free. His negation takes on the character of a
religion of which he is the visible head, priest and
communicant. The -situation and the problem are
not new. It is recorded that Jesus Christ was
offered a choice between inclining to his mother's
wish and following his own spiritual welfare and
that he chose the latter.
All this is the inevitable loss and pain of war but
it is no problem. It is memory, past time, and his
problem is a present one. He has said his "No" to
the "thou shalts" and "thou shalt nots" of the Irish
Roman Catholic Church, one of the least accom­
modating of the churches of Christendom, and to
the claims of Irish politics, most tyrannical of all
oppressed nation politics. But one more. chain still
binds him-his associations. Stephen believes him­
self capable of the greatest things and this is an
offence against the easy-going egalitarianism of
youth. He must constantly suffer the, to him,
exasperating experience of being too lightly valued.
He is surrounded by those who doubt and by those
41
 JAME S J O YCE
who tnock and others who are indifferent. Of all
these his friend, Mulligan, is in some way the
epitome. Every word, every action of the light­
hearted Buck aroµses in him mistrust and hostility.
Further, he envies Mulligan his carefree soul, his
physical courage and strength. One feels that the
Stephen of Ulysses is riding for a fall. His friends
have become obstacles to his progress and he must
break with them. That in him which is amiable and
that in him which is artist are by themselves not
capable of the operation, therefore he must call to
their aid all the negative qualities of his nature as
the armourer makes also the kick of a gun serve his
purpose. Only one ofthe social ties does he recognise.
He will have nothing to do with religion and
country, but he accepts the family. His family may
call on him for physical help and service if it
demands no spiritual servitude. That help and
service he will give if he can.
But there'-s the rub; Stephen is entirely without
means. He stands in boots and clothes that were
given him by Mulligan. He has a job as teacher at
Mr. Deasy's school but his salary is barely sufficient
for drinks. He owes bits of money all round the
town. Let an individualist artist deny religion and
politics as vehemently as he will, economics is
something he cannot deny. He will take his chance
with heaven and hell; with a little luck and some
judgment he will avoid the police and the firing
squad; but he must eat the bread, wear the clothes
and shelter under the roof made by others, and pay
for these privileges. Some misguided people have at
times affirmed that the stimulus of poverty is useful
to the artist and it .may be darkly hinted that one
day one of these misguided individuals will come to
an untimely end. Poverty was never any good to
anybody. Starving a racehorse and doubling his
42
 JAMES JOYCE
handicap doesn't help him to win � race, so in
what way is an artist or any inventor advantaged by
being starved and overhandicapped? Not all
Stephen's trouble of mind but all his problem is
economic. His poverty has conditioned his relations
to women and is in fact at the root of all his distress.
He has never been loved by any woman, for the love
of good women is more expensive than that of the
other sort. What love he had he bought and he had
what he paid for, but no more.
With the word "Usurper" on his lips, Stephen
turns his back on Mulligan and Haines and goes on
to Mr. Deasy's school. Interpreting the meaning of
the word in the light of the sentence he utters a few
hours later, "Ireland must be important because it
belongs to me," we can take it to signify that they
who should serve him demand of him services, and
that his rightful heritage of opportunity is being
enjoyed by the undeserving. He partly escapes
from this bitter and hostile mood in Mr. Deasy's
school. Here he is not provoked by Mulligan's over­
bearing wit or irritated by the complacency of the
Sassenach, Haines. He has a job to do and does it
at least as well as anybody else. Roman history and
English literature are the lessons. The boys, one
imagines, are the sons of fairly well-to-do, middle­
class Dubliners. With one exception (the dullest
and weakest boy in the school), Stephen has no
kindly feelings towards them. They also are
usurpers. From the sly whisperings and titterings
of back row boys at the mention of Kingstown pier
he knows that they share experiences of pierhead
flirtations. "With envy he watched their faces."
His own sexual experience was a sudden plunge
from romantically innocent longings into the promis­
cuity of bought love. Tittering · flirtation with
agreeable flappers was to him an unknown province.
43
 JA MES JO Y C E
But he notes a witty phrase that occurs to him in tb�
course of the lesson : "Kingstown pier . . . a disap­
pointed bridge," and he resolves to work it off on
Haines over drinks that evening, despising himselfat
the same time for playing the jester to people whom
he despises.
History, for the boys, is a struggle to learn the
record of past events ; for Stephen it is a struggle
against the past as it is recorded in his body and
mind and in the social element in which he lives.
History would present him with his life task ready
made. He has inherited a religion, a national
cause, a social position-all tyrannical agencies
jealous of his life and time. Their demand for
sacrifice must be continually disputed. It is a
wearying struggle, and a mood of weariness
dominates the .Nestor episode, matching the mood of
bitterness and, resentment that dominated the
preceding one. A running speculative commentary,
unspoken, accompanies his teaching of the lesson.
Why do some things escape recognition while others,
not neGessarily the most important, obtain a
permanent place in the memory of man? Why did
this thing happen instead of that other which,
before the moment of time in which it happened,
was among the many things that might have hap­
pened? "Had Pyrrhus not fallen by a beldam's
hand in Argos or Julius Caesar not been knifed to
death." A comment more charged with the passion
of his own conflict with the church occurs when
young Talbot, repeating (vcidas, comes to the lines:
Through the dear might of Him that walked the waves.
"Of Him that walked the waves. Here also over
these craven hearts his shadow lies and on the
scoffer's heart and lips and on mine. It lies upon .
their eager faces who offered him a coin of the
44
 JAMES JOYCE

tribute. To Caesar what is Caesar's, to God what

is God's. A long look from dark eyes, a riddling
sentence to be woven and woven on the church's
looms . Ay."
For ever on the defensive with his equals, Stephen
has pity for weakness. It is Thursday, hockey at
ten, and the boys rush eagerly out of the classroom
to the playing field. One boy, the awkward, back­
ward, weedy Cyril Sargent, stays behind. He is in
distress with his algebra and Mr. Deasy has ordered
him to come to Stephen for assistance. Stephen
explains, demonstrates, encourages. Something in
the boy recalls to him his own youth.
"Like him was I, these sloping shoulders, this
gracelessness. My childhood bends beside me. Too
far for me to lay a hand there once or lightly. Mine
is far and his secret as our eyes. Secrets, silent, stony
sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts: secrets
weary of their tyranny: tyrants willing to be
dethroned.''
Mr. Deasy returns from the playground and takes
Stephen to his study to pay him his salary. He is a
shrewd, brave old man. As is the case with all old
men in Ulysses, his portrait is painted with delicate
sympathy. Joyce reserves his satire and caricature
for the younger generation. With such a difference
of age, temperament and social outlook it is necessary
that they shall talk past each other but they do so
with an instinctive sympathy each for the other's
worth.. Stephen is as deferential with Mr. Deasy
as he is cantankerous with his own contemporaries.
In these days of "youth" movements (generally
started by some juvenile man past middle age to
instil, with some profit to himself, a little youth into
his gravely senile juniors) this unforced respect for
age on the part of Stephen seems worth noting.
Mr. Deasy is a just man, careful of money because
45
 JAM E S JO Y C E
he knows its value, and he counsels a like respect for
this powerful instrument to Stephen, well knowing
that his wise words will be disregarded. His view of
national character is sounder than Stephen's for
when he asks if Stephen knows "what is the proudest
word you will ever hear from an Englishman's
mouth?" Stephen replies: "That on his empire the
sun never sets." No doubt Mr. Deasy knows better.
" 'I will tell you,' he said solemnly, 'what is his
proudest boast. I paid my way.' " He was right.
There never has been an English empire. It was
always British, which is to say that at least four
nations collaborated in the making of it. And the
boast about paying their way certainly had, per­
haps still has, a great vogue among Englishmen.
But Stephen is wiser and fairer than his senior when
they speak of the Jews.
Mr. Deasy thinks the Jew merchant is working
the destruction of Old England.
" 'A merchant,' Stephen said, 'is one who buys
cheap and sells dear, Jew or Gentile, is he not?'
" 'They have sinned against the light,' Mr.
Deasy said gravely. 'And you can see the darkness
in their eyes. And that is why they are wanderers on
the earth to this day.' "
To Stephen, who wills his own personal freedom,
history is a nightmare from which he is trying to
awake. Mr. Deasy accepts all the obligations
imposed upon him by the past of his race and
believes that all history is moving forward to one
great goal, the manifestation of God. But what is
God?
". Stephen jerked his thumb towards the window,
saymg:
" 'That is God.'
"Hooray ! Ay ! Whrrwhee !
" 'What ?' Mr. Deasy asked.
46
 J AMES J OYCE
" 'A shout in the street,' Stephen answered,
shrugging his shoulders."
There is an outbreak of foot and mouth disease in
Ireland and Mr. Deasy believes the disease to be
curable if the right treatment is adopted. It can be
cured, he thinks, with Koch's preparation which has
been used with success by Austrian cattle-doctors.
His advocacy of the Koch treatment in official
quarters has failed, as he darkly hints, on account
of intrigues and backstairs influence, so now he will
try publicity. While Stephen waits, he types a letter
to the press and asks Stephen to use his influence
with his journalist friends to get it printed.
Stephen promises that he will do what he can, takes
the letter and leaves.
In the quieter, early episodes of Ulysses motives
are given out that with variations recur constantly
in the orchestration of the later episodes. When he
takes Mr. Deasy's letter Stephen coins for himself
the Mulliganesque nickname, "bullockbefriending
bard" ; history is a "rughtmare" ; God a "shout in
the street" ; faithless wives who brought strife into
the world are mentioned by Mr. Deasy; the identity
of Shakespeare in his plays is first mentioned on the
walk to the bathing cove, the mystery of father and
son kinship as well. Verbal pattern and plot are
fused together in one.
Before Stephen was out of earshot at the bathing
cove, Mulligan called out to him the rendezvous---..:
"The Ship, half twelve"-and Stephen assents.
Presumably he intended at the time to go there, but
he changes his mind and sends instead a yryptic
telegram, a quotation from Meredith's The Ordeal
of Richard Feverel: "The sentimentalist is he who
would enjoy without incurring the immense debtor­
ship for a thing done." Then, glad to be alone, he
goes for a walk on Sandymount shore. The morning
47
 JA M E S JOY C E
is bright and clear but not cloudless. The third
episode is a record of Stephen's thoughts and sensa­
tions during his stroll. The character of his thought
has changed. He is no longer on the defensive as
he was with Mulligan and Haines in the tower, or
weary and dispirited as he was in Mr. Deasy's
school. He is free and alone with a vast, bright
space around him. This is incomparably the
richest, the most musical of all the earlier episodes.
I went to 29 Universita tsstrasse one evening, after
reading the three episodes, for a chat and to return
the Little Reviews.
"You have read them?" said Joyce. "What do
you think of them?"
"I like them all," I said. "But I found the third
one so exciting, and I've just finished reading it,
that I can hardly think of the rest. I think I'm
right in calling it the best. No?"
Joyce picked up the slim paper-covered volume.
"I think you are," he said. "It's my own prefer­
ence. You understand that this is the opening of the
book? My Ulysses appears in the next episode.
What is it you like about this one?"
"It is rich," I said, "and full of light and colour.
But apart from the colour and material I like the
Stephen in it. He has the freshness of the schoolboy
Stephen in A Po rtrait of the Artist. And then I like
the seashore. And I've painted a lot on seashores,
Cornish mainly, between St. Ives and Land's End,
so I know something about them."
Does any other prose writer know and enjoy his
own work as Joyce knows and enjoys his? We
expect the poet to recognise and place any one of
his lines, but it must be a rare thing for the writer of
prose to be able to do as much. He would need
first to compose with as much care and to be very
satisfied with the result. Joyce composes with
48
 JAME S JOYCE
infinite pains, but he looks on his handiwork when
he has done it and finds it good.
"You catch the drift of the thing?" said Joyce.
"It's the struggle with Proteus. Change is the
theme. Everything changes-sea, sky, man, animals.
The words change, too."
He began to read the episode from the beginning
in a smooth, easy way, without emphasis, which is
his normal manner of reading the unspoken
thoughts of his personages. Emphasis and the
normal speaking voice too much suggest the
normal spoken word. There is nothing from begin­
ning to end of Proteus that is not thought or sensa­
tion. Other characters who come into the picture do
so only as part of the content of Stephen's mind.
Through his senses the seashore comes to life. The
natural abode of change is that area between low
water and high water mark. It is easier to believe
that life began here than that it began in a garden.
Tides ebb and flow, cheating the clock every day,
lagging behind. The volume of water changes,
spring to neap and neap to spring again. Cold
water flows over hot sand. Sea breeze and land­
wind alternate. The colour of sea and sky changes
like shot-silk. The sea makes and unmakes the land.
Steel-hard rocks are broken up, firm contours
ofland are dissolved and remade. A sea-town drifts
inland and the houses of an inland town topple
into the sea. Yellow sand, lying neatly round rocks,
is taken away by an overnight storm and a floor of
black boulders appears. Then with the smooth
lapping of the next calm the yellow carpet is
laid again. There is a whole population of plants
and animals here and of living things that are
neither plant nor animal. Carcasses of man,
beast, bird, fish washed ashore, decompose. Sea and
sand bury them. Wreckage rots and rusts and is
49
 JAMES JOYCE

pounded to pieces and every tide brings new

flotsam and jetsam, lays it on other ribbed sand,
other stones. The seashore is never twelve hours the
same.
To this Protean province comes Stephen. With
open eyes he walks through space. In it things lie
neheneinander. He calls it the "ineluctable modality
of the visible." With eyes shut he walks through
space in time. "Time is the ineluctable modality of
the audible." One happening follows the other
nacheinander.
"My definitions of space and time are good.
What?'' said Joyce.
Stephen has suffered a sea change. There is
nothing in him sullen, listless, bitter, resigned,
weary. With no half hostile friends to force him
into a defensive watchfulness, no longer performing
wearily an uncongenial task, he is free, alone,
essentially himself. He is a magician's apprentice
experimenting with new magic. Whatever images
are shown him by his memory they · can cause him
no remorse, no shame, no regret. They are material
for his poetic improvisations like the sights, sounds
and smells of land and sea around him. His
invention, humour and sensibility are memory proof.
He sees two old midwives come cjown to the beach
with a bag to gather cockles and with the humour
of fantastic association, imagines a telephone cable
of navel-cords trailing back through time to Eden
garden and himself ringing up our first parents
through his own navel.
His feet seem to be conveying him to the house of
Richie Goulding, his maternal uncle, but his mood
is too rich to waste upon a visit, the nature of which
he knows beforehand. He remembers a typical
reception in the house of uncle Richie. It is, like his
own, a house in decay.
50
 JAME S JOYCE
Without wincing, he remembers pages of his
follies. "You prayed to the devil in Serpentine
Avenue that the fubsy widow in front might lift her
clothes still more from the wet street. 0 si, certo !
Sell your soul for that, do, dyed rags pinned round
a squaw. More tell me, more still ! On the top of
the Howth tram alone crying to the rain: naked
women ! What about that, eh?
"What about what? What else were they invented
for?"
His conscience has no better luck when it reminds
him of his before-the-mirror vanities and fantastical
literary projects. He mimics himself gaily:
"You bowed to yourself in the mirror, stepping
forward to applause earnestly, striking face. Hurray
for the Goddamned idiot! Hray! No-one saw:
tell no-one. . . . "
Sight of the Pigeon-house reminds him of Paris
and of Kevin Egan's son, who introduced him to
the blasphemies of M. Leo Taxil.
"Q.ui vous a mis dans cette fichue position?"
"C'est le pigeon, Joseph."
Joyce stopped often to laugh at his own composi­
tion as he read through Stephen's recollection of his
Paris exploits.
"Proudly walking. Whom were you trying to
walk like? Forget: a dispossessed. With mother's
money-order, eight shillings, the banging door of
the postoffice slammed in your face by the usher.
Hunger toothache. Encore deux minutes. Look clock.
Must get. Fermi. Hired dog! Shoot him to bloody
bits with a bang shotgun, bits man spattered walls
all brass buttons. Bits man khrrrrklak in place clack
back. Not hurt? Oh, that's all right. Shake hands.
See what I meant, see? Oh, that's all right. Shake
a shake. Oh, that's all only all right.
"You were going to do wonders, what? Mission-
51
 JAMES JOYCE
ary to Europe after fiery Columbanus. Fiacre and
Scotus on their creepystools in Heaven spilt from
their pintpots loudlatinlaughing : Euge ! Euge !
Pretending to speak broken English as you dragged
your valise, porter threepence, across the slimy pier
at Newhaven. Comment? Rich booty you brought
back ; Le Tutu, five tattered numbers of Pantalon
Blanc et Culotte Rouge, a blue French telegram,
curiosity to show :
" 'Mother dying come home father.' "
Joyce looked up and said:
"I haven't let this young man off very lightly,
have I? Many writers have written about them­
selves. I wonder if any one of them has been as
candid as I have?"
Yellow sunlight on sand and boulders reminds
Stephen of the lemon streets and houses of Paris.
The same sun is shining there, too. For himself he
sees nothing in Irish nationalism but an authority
to make his art tonguetied, but he is Irish enough
when in Paris to seek out the exiled Fenian, Kevin
Egan, forgotten at home mourning his exile in
cafe, restaurant and printing shop. "Weak wasting
hand on mine. They have forgotten Kevin Egan,
not he them. Remembering thee, 0 Sion."
He turns and scans the shore. Southward he sees
the tower, his home, and foresees his messmates,
Mulligan and Haines, waiting for him that night in
vain. He has told them nothing, but he has resolved
not to go to the tower that night. He sits on a rock,
watc�ing the tide flow, rocks all roµnd him.
"Sir Lout's toys. :Mind you don't get one bang
on the ear. I'm the bloody well gigant rolls all
them bloody well boulders, bones for my stepping­
stones. Feefawfum. I zmellz de bloodz oldz an
Iridzman."
Joyce read this with stammering, cluttered
52
 JAM ES J OY C E
utterance, then stopped with a laugh at the odd
sounds he made.
"Who are Sir Lout and his family?" I said. "The
people who did the rough work at the beginning?"
"Yes," said Joyce. "They were giants right
enough, but weak reproductively. Fasolt and
Fafnir in Das Rhein.rto ld are of the same breed,
sexually weak as the music tells us. My Sir Lout
has rocks in his mouth instead ofteeth. He articulates
badly."
A dog appears and runs towards Stephen, barking.
Stephen fears dogs and remembers Mulligan laugh­
ing at his fear. A gay pretender: but he reflects that
Ireland was ever a Paradise of pretenders. He can't,
however, escape the comparison: Mulligan saved a
man from drowning at the risk of his own life,
while he shakes at a cur's yelping. Would he do
what Mulligan did? No twisting and turning help
him. He is forced to confess that he would not. He
pictures to himself the horror of death by water and
the vision fades into that of his mother's death
agony. The dog's master and mistress appear at the
surf edge, looking for cockles. Stephen's attention
is fixed on the dog.
"Did you see the point of that bit about the dog?"
said Joyce. "He is the mummer among beasts-the
Protean animal."
"Weininger says somet4ing about the imitative
nature of the dog in his Uber den let;:.ten Dingen," I
remembered.
"He does?" said Joyce. "This one mimics the
other animals while Stephen is watching him.
Listen."
" 'Their dog ambled about a bank of dwindling
sand, trotting, sniffing on all sides. Looking for
something lost in a past life. Suddenly he made off
like a bounding hare, ears flung back, chasing the
53
 J AMES J OYCE
shadow of a lowskimming gull. The man's
shrieked whistle struck his limp ears. He turned,
bounded back, came nearer, trotted on twinkling
shanks. Ort a field tenney a buck, trippant, proper,
unattired. At the lacefringe of the tide he halted
with stiff forehoofs, seawardpointed ears. His
snout lifted barked at the wavenoise, herds of sea­
morse. . . . The dog yelped running to them,
reared up and pawed them, dropping on all fours,
again reared up at them with mute bearish fawning.
Unheeded he kept by them as they came towards
the drier sand, a rag of wolf's tongue redpanting
from his jaws. His speckled body ambled ahead of
them and then loped off at a calf's gallop. The car­
cass lay on his path. He stopped, sniffed, stalked
round it, brother, nosing closer, went round it,
sniffling rapidly like a dog all over the dead dog's
bedraggled fell. . . . Along by the edge of the mole
he lolloped, dawdled, smelt a rock and from under
a cocked hindleg pissed against it. He trotted for­
ward and, lifting his hindleg, pissed quick short at
an unsmelt rock. The simple pleasures of the poor.
His hindpaws then scattered sand: then his fore­
paws dabbled and delved. Something he buried
there, his grandmother. He rooted in the sand,
dabbling, delving and stopped to listen to the air,
scraped up the sand again with a fury of his claws,
soon ceasing, a pard, a panther, got in spouse­
breach, vulturing the dead.' "
"There he is," said Joyce. "Panther: all
animals.''
"I don't know a better word-picture of a dog," I
said. "English and Irish, we are all dog-lovers.
But when we write about dogs or paint them we
sentimentalise them. Landseer."
"This certainly wasn't done by a dog-lover," said
Joyce. "I don't like them. I am afraid of them."
54
 J A ME S J OY C E
The word "panther" brings to Stephen's mind
first Haines's dream and then his own.
"After he woke me up last night same dream
or was it ? Wait. Open hallway. Street of harlots.
Remember. Haroun al Raschid. I am almosting it.
That man led me , spoke . . . "
"Almosting!" I said.
"Yes," said Joyce. " That's all in the Protean
character of the thing. Everything changes: land,
water, dog, time of day. Parts of speech change,
too. Adverb becomes verb."
The dog's owners are gypsies. Stephen sees them
go, picturing to himself their strange existence in
dark lanes, under archways at night. He remembers
fragments of gypsy speech. All words are precious
to the poet, gypsy words no less than those of
Aquinas. "Monkwords , marybeads jabber on their
girdles: roguewords, tough nuggets patter in their
pockets." He watches the gypsy woman's receding
back on which her spoils are hung. "She trudges,
schlepps, trains, drags, trascines her load." Joyce
repeated the sentence.
"I like that crescendo of verbs," he said. "The
irresistible tug of the tides."
Tides of another blood move in the gypsy
woman's veins. A god comes to her in the shape of
death.
"He comes, pale vampire, through storm his eyes,
his bat sails bloodying the sea, mouth to her
mouth's kiss.
"Here. Put a pin in that chap, will you? My
tablets. Mouth to her kiss. No. Must be two of 'em.
Glue 'em well. Mouth to her mouth's kiss."
He fumbles in his pocket for paper to hold the
words, finds only the banknotes of his salary, curses
himself for having forgotten to take slips from the
library counter and finally tears off the half blank
55
 JAMES JOYCE

last page of Mr. Deasy's letter on the foot and

mouth disease, to serve as tablets for his inspiration.
He lies on his back, his mind full of memories. The
noise of the moving sea breaks in on them and his
thoughts turn outwards again. · He makes speech
for the rocks and water.
"Listen: a fourworded wavespeech : seesoo, hrss,
rsseeiss, ooos. Vehement breath of waters amid
seasnakes, rearmg horses, rocks. In cups of rocks it
slops: flop, slop, slap: bounded in barrels. And,
spent, its speech ceases. It flows purling, widely
flowing, floating foampool, flower unfurling."
Out at sea they are dragging for a drowned man.
He heard at the bathing pool that the drowned man
would rise that day and he pictures the bloated
carcass being dragged over the gunwale ofthe boat.
"A seachange this, brown eyes saltblue. Sea­
death, mildest of all deaths known to man. Old
Father Ocean. Prix de Paris: beware of imitations.
Just you give it a fair trial. We enjoyed ourselves
immensely."
But now he must go. He dallies yet awhile among
rocks, sand and seashells. The seashells remind him
that his teeth are hollow like them. Shall he go to
the dentist with Mr. Deasy's money? It isn't enough.
Mulligan threw his handkerchief to him after using
it as a razorwipe, but he left it lying and must use
his fingers. He lays dry snot from his nose on a
ledge ofrock and looks round to see ifhe is observed.
"He turned his face over a shoulder, rere regard­
ant. Moving through the air high spars of a three­
master, her sails brailed up on the crosstrees,
homing, upstream, silently moving, a silent ship."
Joyce laid down the Little Review. At times, in
reading the long monologue, he had sunk his voice
to a talking-to-himself murmur so that only precise
articulation and a silent room allowed it to be
56
 J A MES JOYC E
audible. But inside this small scale of tones and with
a minimum of emphasis he expressed all the moods
of reverie, mockery, perception.
I stopped at the door as I was about to leave.
"You know, Joyce," I said, "when Stephen sees
that three-masted schooner's sails brailed up to her
crosstrees.''
"Yes," he said. "What about it?"
"Only this. I sailed on schooners of that sort once
and the only .word we ever used for the spars to
which the sails are bent was 'yards.' 'Crosstrees'
were the lighter spars fixed near the lower mast­
head. Their function was to give purchase to the
topmast standing rigging."
Joyce thought for a moment.
"Thank you for pointing it out," he said.
"There's no sort of criticism I more value than that.
But the word 'crosstrees' is essential. It comes in
later on and I can't change it. After all, a yard is also
a crosstree for the onlooking landlubber."
And crosstree does recur in the pattern in that
episode where Stephen discusses Shakespeare with
some Dublin scholars. ". . . Who, put upon by his
fiends, stripped and whipped, was nailed like bat to
barndoor, starved on crosstree. . . . "
Joyce told me that some admirers of A Portrait of
the Artist as a Yo ung Man, Americans, I understood,
had expressed disappointment at the way Ulysses
was shaping.
"TheY, seem to think," he said, "that after writing
the Portrait I should have sat down to write some­
thing like a sermon. I ought to have a message, it
seems."
A conflict of direction would be no new thing in
an artist. Religion and politics are the most frequent
rivals of words, paint and stone: It isn't necessary,
one supposes, that the victory of one side shall mean
57
 J A M ES J OY C E
the annihilation of the other, but it must mean that
it has won the direction. Stephen first appears as a
named person in A Po rtrait of the Artist as a Young
Man but there is no doubt that he is the unnamed
narrator of the first three studies in Dubliners. The
story of Stephen's early years has one peculiarity
that marks it off from the general experience of boys,
sensitive or insensitive, weak or strong: that is his
intense preoccupation with words. To most boys
words are convenient counters and no more. When
you are hungry, words like ''bread" and "butter"
provoke pleasant thoughts and are useful if you say
them to the right person. And you have to say the
right words at games or the other fellows laugh at
you. Again, they are troublesome and slippery
things in lessons, with spellings and logical relations
specially devised to make them as difficult as
possible. But to Stephen they were mysteriously
alive. In a sense, they were much more potent than
the objects, actions and relations they stood for. You
say a word or think of its shape and sound and it
makes you unhappy or afraid. You say another and
a feeling of peace and joy comes to you. The child
narrator in the story� The Sisters, says : "Every night
as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself
the word paralysis. It had always sounded strangely
in my ears, like the word gno mo n in the Euclid and
the word simo ny in the Catechism. But now it
sounded to me like the name of some maleficent and
sinful being." And Stephen, in A Po rtrait of the
Artist : " Suck was a queer word. . . . But the sound
was ugly. Once he had washed his hands in the
lavatory of the Wicklow Hotel and his father pulled
the stopper up by the chain after and the dirty water
went down tlirougn the hole in the basm. And when
it had all gone down slowly the hole in the basin
had made a sound like that: suck. Only louder."
58
 JAMES J OYCE

There came a time when the storms ofpuberty, his

care for the state of his soul, his preoccupation with
religious experience and church doctrine and ritual,
poverty, youthful rivalries displaced temporarily
his interest in his predestined material. But the
storms die away and the dominant interest returns,
enriched, stronger. It is a tenacious growth that no
painful experience can kill. It seems like an inversion
of normal values, yet while Stephen felt himself to be
lost in mortal sin and despaired of pardon, when he
obtained pardon and peace and resolved to devote
his life to the service of the church he was not
undergoing an experience more formative, more
fruitful than when, as a boy, he stood before the
hotel lavatory basin listening to the last handful of
s�iled water say "suck" as it went down the waste­
p1pe.

59
 CHAPTER FOUR
THERE is a sudden break with Stephen after the end
of the third episode. The clock is put back to eight
in the morning, but the scene changes from the
Martello tower at Sandycove to the kitchen of a
house in Eccles Street. A man of different race, age
and character comes into the foreground of the book
and almost without a break stays there till the end.
He is Joyce's Ulysses, the Jew, Leopold Bloom.
Bloom and Stephen are opposites. Bloom is while
Stephen is becoming. He leans to the sciences,
Stephen to the arts. He is by race a Jew, is equable
in temper, humane andjust, whereas Stephen, the
Gentile, is egotistical, embittered, denies his social
obligations and can be generous but is rarely just.
But there is a difference of dimension and substance
as well as of character. Stephen is a self-portrait,
and therefore one-sided. Bloom is seen from all
angles, as no self-portrait can be seen. He is as
plastic as Stephen is pictorial.
The question, is this or that character in fiction
good or bad, sympathetic or unsympathetic ought
to be aesthetically immaterial and the answer un­
important; yet there is something in us that asks it.
Mr . Wyndham Lewis considers Stephen a priggish,
mawkish and altogether objectionable young man,
but why should that matter if he is presented with
force enough to make him organic and memorable?
On this logic a Christian Scientist ought to turn
down a picture of a hospital ward, a vegetarian one
of a b utcher's shop and both of them would refuse
60
 JAMES JOYCE

to enter a gallery where a picture of a bullfight was

hung even if Goya painted it. If in the world of
imagination we allow only such characters as would
make good neighbours and club-mates there would
b e no room in it for Iago, Macbeth, Madame
Bovary and Cousine Bette. However, putting
Stephen to the social and moral test, is he really
such a priggish and detestable person? His mood
for the first hour of Ulysses is a weary and embittered
mood, but then Stephen is a Dubliner and what
Dubliner, or for that matter what Londoner, is at
his bright best at eight o'clock in the morning?
That mood changes in the schoolroom. There he is
sympathetic to the backward schoolboy and, with­
out malice behind his manner, he is deferential to a
man three times his age. When he walks on the sea­
strand his mood is one of bright, elfin, poetic
humour. Later in the day he is delicate and tactful
with his sister, and, still later, he forgets his own
existence in philosophical discussion. Although not
in funds he stands many rounds of drinks for his
friends. Humanly considered, Stephen is certainly
as sympathetic as Stavrogin and there is no doubt
that he muchmore resembles a possible human being.
Joyce said to me once in Zi.irich:
"Some people who read my book, A Portrait of the
Artist forget that it is calied A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young lvfan.."
He underlined with his voice the last four words
of the title. At first I thought I understood what he
meant, but later on it occurred to me that he may
have meant one of two things, . or both. The
emphasis may have indicated that he who wrote
the book is no longer that young man, that through
time and experience he has become a different
person. Or it may have meant that he wrote the
book looking backwards at the young man across a
61
 JAMES JOYCE

space of time as the landscape painter paints distant

hills, looking at them through a cube of air-filled
space, painting, that is to say, not that which is, but
that which appears to be. Perhaps he meant both.
However, it led me to ask myself if the writer, repre­
senting his own past life with words, is subject to the
same limitations as the painter representing his
physical appearance with paint on a flat surface.
How near can each one get to the facts of his own
particular case? Their limitations cannot of course
be the same, but they are equivalent, and on the
whole, the painter has the lighter handicap and is
the likelier of the two to produce a true image of
himself in his own material, although the extra
difficulties that confront him are considerable. His
first limitation is the inevitable mirror. The best of
quicksilvered glass gives an image that is less true
than an unreflected one, and the size of that image
is by half smaller than it would be, were the same
object standing where stands the mirror. He sees
in the mirror a man holding in his left hand brushes
and in his right hand a palette and he paints right­
handedly this left-handed other self. Then he is
fatally bound to paint himself painting himself.
His functional, his trade self is in the foreground.
The strained eye, the raised arm the crooked
shoulder may be ingeniously disguised (they
generally are) but something of objective truth gets
lost in the process. And he is not only painting
himself painting himself; he is also painting himself
posing to himself. He is painter and model, too.
The painter may be pure painter, but the model
may be a bit of a poet or half an actor, and this
individual will slyly present to his better half's un­
suspecting eye something ironical, heroic or pathetic,
according to the mood ofthe moment or the lifetime's
habit. The limitation of viewpoint is obvious. The
62
 JAMES JOYCE
painter's two-dimensional mode of presentation
limits him to one view of an object whatever he
paints. He chooses that view and must abide by his
choice. All that he can do is to convey the impression
in painting one side of an object that the other side
exists. In the case of any other object but himself he
has at any rate the whole compass to choose from.
He can walk round any other model but not round
himself. So that, unless he resorts to one of those
cabinet mirrors in which tailors humiliate us with
the shameful back and side views of our bodies, he
can see nothing of himself but full face and three­
quarter profile. All this has to do merely with the
getting to grips with what is usually called nature.
The resulting picture, as all the galleries of Europe
testify, may be as good as any other. Are there any
Rembrandts we would change for the best self­
portraits? One difficulty or limitation more or less
among thousands is of no consequence.
And the writer's self-portrait? Goethe subtitled
his own, Dichtung und Wahrheit. Did he mean that
he consciously mixed fiction and fact to puzzle,
delude or please, or did he mean that some Dichtung
would be there by sleight of memory or because
there were many true things better left unsaid? All
the psychological inducements to fictify his portrait
are present in greater measure for the writer than
for the painter. A painter will rather paint the wart
on his nose than the writer describe with perfect
objectivity the wart on his character. All the posing
that the painter does for himself the writer must do
also. If he has a passion for confession he will
exaggerate some element or other-make the wart
too big or put it in the wrong place. He has his
favourite role too--villain, hero or confidence man­
and he would be more than human if he failed to
act it. But, worst of all, his medium is not an active
63
 JAMES JOYC E
sense, but memory, and who knows when memory
ceases to be memory and becomes imagination? No
human memory has ever recorded the whole of the
acts and thoughts of its possessor. Then why one
thing more than another? Forgetting and remember­
ing are creative agencies performing all kinds of
tricks . of selection, arrangement and adaptation.
The record of a man's past is inside him and there
he must look with the same constancy as the painter
looks at his reflection in the mirror; only he is not
looking at something (still less round something like
a sculptor) but into something, like a mystic con­
templating his navel. He can as little walk round
his past life psychologically as the painter can walk
round his reflected image. Between the moment of
experiencing and the moment of recording there is
an ever-widening gulf of time across which come
rays of remembered things, like the rays of stars long
since dead to the astronomer's sensitive plate. Their
own original colours have been modified by the
medium through which they passed. The "I" who
records is the "I" who experienced, but he has
grown or dwindled; in any case, he has changed.
The continuous present of the painter is the writer's
continuous past. No doubt, the most fervently
naturalistic painter paints from memory, for there
is a moment when he turns his eye away from the
scene to his canvas and he must remember what he
saw, but for practical purposes his time may be
regarded as present time. Interpretation in
material, words, pigment, clay, stone, is equivalent
in all arts and all have the same aesthetic necessities.
One other thing: if the writer .cannot see the other
side of himself, by a still more elementary disability
he cannot see the outside of himself in action at all.
He knows what he does as well as any, and why he
does it better than any, buthow he doesit less thanany.
64
 JAME S JOYCE
Does he even, for example, know the sound of his
own voice? If he is a singer he may, after long
practice, get to know the sound of it when he is
singing, but he will certainly not know how it
sounds when he is arguing with a taxi driver. He
knows the inside of himself and the outside of every­
body else. He supplies other folk with his inner
experiences and motives, and himself, by judgment
and comparison, with the visible outward of their
actions. The mimic among our friends will show
the assembled company how we walk or talk. It
seems strange and unbelievable to us, but from the
laughter and "just like him"s of the others we know
that it must be reasonably like. The essence, how­
ever, of this comparison is to show that all self­
portraits, whether painted or written, are one­
sided-that they are pictorial in character, not
plastic.
Stephen Dedalus is the portrait and Bloom the all­
round man. Bloom is son, father, husband, lover,
friend, worker and citizen. He is at home and in
exile. One morning he leaves his home and after a
time returns. True, he is absent from home only
about seventeen hours, but one day or many: it is of
no consequence. If a thousand years may be as a
day, why not a day as a thousand years? The same
elements are present in them all. Bloom's wander­
ings do not take him outside the city boundaries ;
but it is enough. Blake said that he could touch the
ends of space with his walking stick at the end of his
garden. Dublin is the locality, and the day on which
the action takes plate is the 1 6th of June, 1904.
Nothing is recorded that did not take place or
might not have taken place on that day.
Rodin once called sculpture "le dessin de tous les
cotes." Leopold Bloom is sculpture in the Rodin
sense. He is made of an infinite number of contours
65
 JAM E S JOY C E
drawn from every conceivable angle. He is the social
being in black clothes and the naked individual
underneath them. All his actions are meticulously
recorded. None is marked "Private." He does his
allotted share in the economic life of the city and
fulfils the obligations ofcitizen, husband and friend,
his body functioning meanwhile according to the
chemistry of human bodies. We see him as he
appears to himself and as he exists in the minds of
his wife, his friends and his fellow citizens. By the
end of the day we know more about him than we
know about any other character in fiction. They are
all hemmed in in a niche ofsocial architecture, but
Bloom stands in the open and we can walk round
him. His past is revealed in his own memory and
in the memories ofothers. He is a Jew of Hungarian
origin. The family name was Virag but Leopold's
father changed it to Bloom. Leopold was baptised a
Protestant and later a Roman Catholic. His wife,
Marion, is the daughter ofMajor Brian Tweedy and
a Gibraltar Jewess. · There were two children of
Bloom's marriage, one ofwhom, Rudolph, died on
his eleventh day. The other, Millicent, is just fifteen
and works as a photographer's assistant in Mullingar.
The completeness with which Bloom is presented
is at times bewildering. There are innumerable
changes of key and scale. ,Sometimes he is a dark
phantom in the middle distance and then he sud­
denly dominates the foreground plane. He may
stand like a floodlit building, stark and flat against
the sky or he may be entirely built up out of
reflections of his surroundings. Now a searchlight
illumines violently one part ofhim and now normal
daylight flows over him from head to foot. But
always he is the same kindly, prudent, level­
tempered, submissive, tragically isolated, shrewd,
sceptical, simple, uncensorious person, with an out-
66
 J AMES J OYCE

ward seemingly soft and pliant but with a hard

inner core of self-sufficiency.
His wife, Marion, is a onesidedly womanly woman.
She is unfaithful, but her infidelities are not the
furtive, conscience-stricken infidelities of average
life. They are the actions of a body that refuses to
accept the rules ofcustom, and therefore has no need
of duplicities. She is proofagainst all doubts ofthe
mind and all remorse of conscience, because,
according to her own scale ofvalues, she does no ill.
She is a shrewd, humorous, wilful personage, who
might perhaps, except for a sisterly quarrel or two,
get on very well with the Wife of Bath. In person
she appears only twice in the book, once in the first
episode and again to speak the epilogue at the end,
but she is ever present in the thoughts ofher man as
he pursues his wanderings throughout the day.
A host of minor characters throng the pages of
Ulysses-two hundred, perhaps. Most of these are
present in the flesh, but those absent or dead
become known to us through the minds of those
living and present. Ofthe dead the most important
are Bloom's father and son and Stephen's mother.
Through the conversat10n of the mourners at his
funeral we become acquainted with Paddy Dignam,
a friend of Bloom. Bloom's earlier friends, Apjohn
and Meredith, now dead, have a ghostly yet amiable
existence. His daughter, Millicent, is absent in
Mullingar but she writes home; we meet her friend,
Alec Bannon, and we hear a great deal about her
from her father and mother. Not all the population
ofthe book is accorded the same measure ofattention
and seriousness oftreatment. Some ofthem, notably
those of the older generation, are portrayed with a
certain humorous and touching intimacy. Stephen's
father, Simon Dedalus, is the principal example, but
with him might stand Martin Cunningham, Jack
67
 J A ME S JOY C E

Power, Ben Dollard and others. They seem to b e

portrait studies conveying all the illusion of character
and experience. Others, as, for example, Professor
MacHugh, Haines the Englishman, young Dignam,
Tom Rochford, are drawn on the flat with a few
suggestive lines. Yet others, and these are of the
most enjoyable, are vital, grotesque types-carica­
tures as a Rowlandson might have conceived them.
The Nameless One and the Citizen in the Cyclops
episode are examples. Blazes Boylan, Marion
Bloom ,s impresario and lover, can hardly be
classed in any of these categories, but in the main
he is a caricature of the overbearing blond beast,
who gets the better of his neighbour in bed and
business, who thinks himself a hero, but who in
reality is a comic automaton.
Most of the people belong to the poorer class of
Dublin citizen. Hardly any of them are what might
be called working people; that is to say, there are
no plumbers, carpenters or railway guards in
regular employment among them. Nearly all are of
the lower middle class, in dire poverty if they have
lost their jobs or property, but a shade above the
well-paid workingman if things are going well with
them. The comfortably-connected Buck Mulligan is
an exception. Apart from Mulligan all the students
are of the hard up or stoney-broke variety. Bloom
canvasses for advertisements; Tom Kernan is a
traveller in tea ; Martin Cunningham has a good
job in Dublin castle ; Simon Dedalus, without
property or position, can only with difficulty give
his daughters a shilling for food ; Cowley is dodging
the bailiffs, and Dollard lives in a home for gentle­
men who have seen better days. The rich bourgeois
and governing patrician, as also the pure and simple
wage worker play no great part in the book. About
ninety per cent of the people in George Moore's
68
 JAME S JOYCE
Dublin are of the Irish literary movement. That
movement, in the persons of some of its most
distinguished representatives, figures also in Ulysses
but in a proportion equal to its importance in the
life of the city.
One important personality that emerges out ofthe
contacts ofmany people is that ofthe city ofDublin.
"I want," said Joyce, as we were walking down
the Universitatstrasse, "to give a picture ofDublin so
complete that if the city one day suddenly disap­
peared from the earth it could be reconstructed out
ofmy book."
We had come to the university terrace where we
could look down on the town.
"And what a city Dublin is!" he continued. "I
wonder if there is another like it. Everybody has
time to hail a friend and start a conversation about
a third party, Pat, Barney or Tim. 'Have you seen
Barney lately? Is he still off the drink?' 'Ay, sure he
is. . I was with him last night and he drank nothing
but claret.' I suppose you don't get that gossipy,
leisurely life in London?"
"No," I said. "But then London isn't a city. It is
a wilderness ofbricks and mortar and the law ofthe
wilderness prevails. All Londoners say, 'I keep
myself to myself.' The malicious friendly sort of
town can't exist with seven million people in it."
But it is not by way of description that Dublin is
created in Ulysses. There is a wealth of delicate
pictorial evocation in Dubliners, but there is little or
none in Ulysses. Streets are named but never
described. Houses and interiors are shown us, but
as if we entered them as familiars, not as strangers
come to take stock of the occupants and inventory
their furniture. Bridges over the Liffey are crossed
and recrossed, named and that is alL We go into
eating-houses and drinking bars as ifthe town were
69
 JA M E S JOYCE
our own and these our customary ports of call.
Libraries, churches, courthouses, the municipal
government, professional associations function before
us without explanations or introductions. The people
are being born, dying, eating and drinking, making
love, betting, boozing, worshipping, getting married
and burying their dead. Politics, especially the
politics of Irish nationalism, and economic questions,
such as the cattle trade with England, are being
fiercely debated. The history of Dublin and of the
Irish nation is served up piping hot in the speech of
living patriots. Young men are struggling for bread
and a place in the sun; prudent middle age is doing
what it can to keep what it has ; and the old are
scheming for a little peace and quietness away from
the hungry generations. Women of all ages aid,
thwart, distract, criticise and comfort them in all
their enterprises. Sex, in all its normal manifesta­
tions, is ever present together with the solidarities
and disputes of families. There is much in Ulysses
that, in the normal acceptation of the word, is
obscene, but very little that is perverse. The
cultural life of Dublin is revealed to us in discussions
on music and literature. It is a thirsty day and any
moment of it seems to be a suitable moment for
having a drink. At times the reader so acutely
realises the existence of Dublin that Dublin's sons
and daughters, even including Bloom and Stephen,
become by comparison unimportant.
How do we come by our vision of place for the
happenings in books? Some pagelong, meticulous
descriptions are lost on us and we place the action
in a setting we know. I have often been obliged to
do this for Balzac; and Borrow's fight with the
Flaming Tinman I always place on a certain road­
side patch between Godstone and Lingfield. But in
reading Tolstoy, George Moore, Kipling and Henry
70
 JAME� JOYCE

Handel Richardson, to mention only four, I see

places in my mind that I never saw with my eyes.
Writing descriptively, Joyce created a pictorial
Dublin in Dubliuers. The slow train in Araby, creep­
ing "among ruinous houses and over the twinkling
river"; the truant schoolboys in An Encounter,
wandering aimlessly among the scattered slums,
along the Dodder bank, through dismal suburbs and
meeting with the sinister pervert; Dublin under
snow as the guests return from the party in The
Dead. There is another way, and that is not to
describe the place at all. "A platform in front of a
castle" ; "A Heath" ; "Before Prospero's Cell" tell
us nothing in particular. The persons when they
possess our imaginations do all that is required. We
lend them freely their ambient of material and
colour; and we have no special instructions in the
matter. One blasted heath, one beetling crag will
do as well as another. But it is essential to Joyce
that we shall not substitute our own home town for
his, and yet in Ulysses he neither paints nor photo­
graphs it for our guidance. It must grow upon us
not through our eye and memory, but through the
minds of the Dubliners we overhear talking to each
other. They must make us guests or adopted
citizens of their city. Names of streets and suburbs,
allusions to the intimate life of the place, are con.­
stantly on their lips. Here and there we get a clue
to the shape and colour of this place or that, but in
the main Dublin exists for us as the essential element
in which Dubliners live. It is not a decor to be
modified at will, but something as native to them
as water to a fish. Joyce's realism verges on the
mystical even in Ulysses.
The Dublin ofDubliners is seen piecemeal as a series
of isolated happenings. The sky is overcast. An
air of corruption and frustration hangs over the city.
71
 JAMES JOYCE
The people are frail human b eings and even when ·
they are corrupt we are made to · feel a human pity
for their weakness. Individual, obscure human
destinies are isolated and endowed with special
importance apart from their place in the mass of
human experience. They are gravely and gently
regarded, �ithout irony, condemnation or any
tendentious contrast. But a hard, bright light
floods the Dublin of Ulysses and the air is a quicken­
ing, tonic air. We see the city as a whole, in a wide
sweep, so that the individual destiny is merged in
the mass of experien�e. Death and decay are
robbed of their sting, for they are never isolated, but
a part of the texture of life, continuing always.
Thus Paddy Dignam's death is balanced by his
son's growth. An act of adultery is seen as a
mechanical and grotesque incident in marriage.
The cries of a woman in childbirth and the cries of
her newborn child mingle with the shouting and
laughter of young men drinking ale. Perhaps it is
because the tempo of Ulysses matches the tempo of
our own lives and repeats their texture in its mani­
fold balances and compensations that the reading
of it is a tonic experience. Fifty years of life, as in
The Old Wives' Tale, is depressing because the
funerals follow too quickly one upon the heels of the
other and people grow old and die before our eyes
as if in a nature-film such as The Life and Death of the
.Nasturtium, only minus the dance-like grace of such
a spectacle.
And the attitude of the writer towards the world
that he sees? Some human mood must invest the
work of every poet, for every poet is himself a
human being. Joyce is a keen-sensed stranger, a
delicate recording instrument, an artificer as
ingenious, patient and daring as the hawklike man
whom Stephen invokes at the end of A Portrait of tr.e
72
 JAMES JOYCE
Artist. It is not easy to define the mood of Ulysses,
but it seems to me that Joyce neither hates nor
loves, neither curses nor praises the world, but that
he affirms it with a "Yes" as positive as that with
which Marion Bloom affirms her prerogative on
the last page. It is not to him a brave new world,
about to set forth upon some hitherto unattempted
enterprise. Rather is it a brave old world, for ever
flowing like a river, ever seeming to change yet
.changing never. The prevailing attitude of Ulysses
is a very humane scepticism-not of tried human
values, necessary at all times for social cohesion, but
of all tendencies and systems whatsoever. There are
moods of pity and grief in it, but the prevailing
mood is humour. Laughter in all tones and keys,
now with the world and now at it, is heard con­
tinually. The laughter reminds us often of the
bright, mocking laughter of Sterne of whom
Nietzsche wrote that he, "the freest of all free
spirits," resembled a squirrel flying from tree to
tree, bewildering the eye with his agility. But then
it often resembles the louder laughter of a Shake­
speare or a Dickens, delighting in the over-lifesize
caricature of human types, the political windbag,
the snarling, scurrilous man, the monumental liar.
There is, too, that rarer grim, noiseless laughter
which shines out through the eyes of a mask. The
relation of woman to man is presented as one of
mighty importance but, in its essence, of lapidary
simplicity. That of man to man is presented as one
full of subtleties and fine shades. Of mother love
not much is said. To father love is ascribed a
significance rarely admitted. Sometimes a faint
note of condemnation of his characters is heard, as
in the case of Mulligan or Lynch, but Joyce looks on
the doings of men, in the words of Blake applied to
Chaucer, "oftener with joke and sport."
73
 CHAPTER FIVE
IN Part Two of Ulysses begin the adventures of Mr.
Bloom. "Don't tell me what happens," says the
novel reader, "or I shan't want to read the book."
But some people have found that nothing, or very
little, happens in the 73 5 pages of the book. Dr.
Jung, of Zurich, the famous psychoanalyst, is one of
them. He finds Thursday, June 16th, 1904, in
Dublin an unimportant sort of day on which, in
reality, nothing at all occurs. It is always difficult
to agree with anybody about what is important, yet
if we enumerate the things that happen in Ulysses
most human beings will agree that of themselves,
apart from the manner of the presentation, these
happenings are important. Included in them are a
funeral, a fight, political discord, an act of seduction,
one of adultery, the birth of a child, a drunken orgy,
a rupture of friendship and the loss of a position. A
new theory as to the character and dominant motive
of a great poet is expounded. Domestic beasts, on
which the life of human society largely depends, are
smitten with a dread disease and the community
brings its varied intelligence to bear on a means to
end that plague. Acts of charity, both public and
private, are performed and acts of treachery as well.
True, there is no declaration of war with proclama­
tions and the calling out of fighting men, no revolu­
tion with conspirators issuing from cellars to take
command of the state, but war and revolution are
present in the memories and aspirations of the
characters of the book. The Boer War and the
74
 JAMES JO Y C E
Russo-Japanese War are living memories and the
Sinn Fein Party is actively organising the citizens of
Ireland for rupture with Great · Britain and the
setting up of a separate state.
Alongside these larger actions there are actions
that may be called common only because they are
being constantly performed by many people all over
the world. They are not and never were un­
important. Thus the preparing and eating of a
breakfast, a bath, looking at bookstalls, wandering
round the town, looking in shop windows, buying
odds and ends of things in shops, lunch, a stroll
through a museum, short talks in the str�et, the
singing of a few songs, a practical joke, stray drinks
here and there: all the things, in short, that some­
body is doing all the time and everybody does
sometimes. If the experience is common why does
Joyce narrate it? Because he is building with an
infinite number of pellets of this clay of common
experience the character of Leopold Bloom.
In the course of many talks with Joyce in Zurich
I found that for him human character was best
displayed-I had almost said entirely displayed­
in the commonest acts of life. How a man ties his
shoelaces or how he eats his egg will give a better
clue to his differentiation than how he goes forth to
war. This must be true, for a man goes forth to a
war so seldom that he has no scope for individuality
in the doing ofit. On this heroic occasion he must do
as others do. His dress is ordered for him. His care­
less shoestring brings down on him wild incivility.
Cutting bread displays character better than cutting
throats. Neither homicide nor suicide can be as
characteristic as the sit of a hat. Character, in short,
lay not in the doing or not doing of a grand action,
but in the peculiar and personal manner of perform­
ing a simple one. It lay also in a man's preferences.
75
 JAMES JOYCE
Does he prefer dogs to cats or does he detest or like
both equally? Is he an amateur of beefsteaks, or
does he, like Mr. Bloom, eat "with relish the inner
organs of beasts and fowls." Oranges or lemons?
Apples or pears? Mozart or Wagner? Woman or
man, thin or fat? And how dressed? What colour?
On which side of a companion does he prefer to
walk? These are socially not weighty matters, but
from the point of view of character differentiation
they are more important than a man's views on
relativity or the Russian Revolution. There is a
further element of character, often lost sight of, and
that is what happens to a man, his destiny. Is he
lucky or unlucky? Do chimney pots fall on his
head in a high wind or do people leave him
fortunes?
Before 1 9 1 8 an article on Joyce, by the late
Mr. Glutton Brock, appeared in the Times Literary
Supplement. This was a critic whose work Joyce
respected, and it appears that he greatly appreciated
Joyce's writings, but in this article he reproached
Joyce for the lack of distinction in his subject
matter.
"What do you think he means?" said Joyce.
"From what you tell me," I said, "I suppose he
means that the persons in your book are undistin­
guished-socially or spiritually-both, perhaps-and
that their actions and destinies are not important."
"Very likely you are right," said Joyce. "Glutton
Brock has always treated my writings generously
and with understanding, b ut if that is what he
means he is certainly wrong. In fact he wrote to me
about it also. He is stating the English preference
for tawdry grandeurs. Even the best Englishmen
seem to love a lord in literature."
Distinguished or not, Mr. Bloom is a singular
person. We are introduced to him as he potters
76
 JAM ES JOY C E
about the kitchen of 7 Eccles Street, preparing
breakfast for his wife and himself. The street is wide,
its houses sizeable. The red brick fai;ades form an
architectural unit and have an air of being good
early Victorian. No doubt it was originally a street
of well-to-do bourgeois. Now it has an air ofbeing
inhabited by working class people. But it is well­
kept and exhibits none of the dilapidation of the
more magnificent Mountj9y Square. The kitchen
where Mr. Bloom is busy is below the street level,
but for a basement is light and airy. Breast-high
railings protect the passer-by from the drop into the
area and mark the property off from the pavement.
The ground floor of No. 7 is now a tobacconist's
shop and small general store. At the back of the
house is what house agents would call a good garden,
which runs down to a lane or mews.
While he is preparing the tray for his wife's break­
fast Mr. Bloom is pondering a kidney for his own.
"Kidneys were in his mind as he moved about the
kitchen softly. . . . " The cat calls for attention and
he, a Jew, pauses to admire the clean, fierce enemy
of rats and mice, the protector of granaries, wor­
shipped by the taskmasters of his forefathers. On
his way out to" get his kidney he stops at the bedroom
door to ask Marion if she also would like something .
tasty. He hears her sleepy negative and the brass
quoits ofthe bed jingle as she turns over. The jingle
ofthis second-hand bed is one ofthe musical refrains
of Ulysses. He crosses to the light side of the street,
enjoying the happy warmth. As with half-shut eyes
he walks, visions ofthe Orient, the sun's home, home,
too, of his race, come to him. In rapid association
the Oriental images pass and merge into the head­
piece over the leader in the Freeman's Journal.
Arthur Griffith's witticism, "Home rule sun rising
up in the north-west from a laneway behind the
77
 J AMES JOYCE
Bank of Ireland" ends the chain of associations to
Bloom's pleased smile.
Larry O'Rourke's pub provokes another train of
thought. The business position is good, that of
M' Auley's is bad. "Of course if they ran a tram­
line along the North Circular from the cattle
market to the quays value would go up like a shot."
Simon Dedalus can mimic O'Rourke wonderfully.
He passes the time ofday with the publican, who is
leaning against the sugarbin in his shirt-sleeves, and
goes on, musing on the mystery of the licensed
vintner's business. How is it that a red-headed bar­
man can come up from County Leitrim and in a
short time blossom out as a complete publican?
Tricks known only to the trade, perhaps. He passes
a school and hears the mass product education being
produced. It is a geography lesson which reminds
him of the mountain that bears his own name:
Slieve Bloom.
He arrives at the window of Dlugacz's pork­
butcher's shop. Only one kidney is left on the
willow patterned plate. The general servant from
the house next door just heads him off at the
counter. Her coarse, muscular body pleases him.
He has looked at it often from his back window,
vigorously whacking carpets on the line. But will
she take the only remaining kidney? To still his
mind he takes up a piece ofDlugacz's wrapping-up
newspaper from the counte:r and begins to read.
"The model farm at Kinnereth on the lakeshore of
Tiberias . . . Moses Montefiore. I thought he
was." The ad. is adorned with a photograph of a
farmhouse with cattle cropping round it. That
reminds him ofthe job he once had as sales clerk to
the cattle salesman, Joe Cuffe. The servant girl
departs with her sausages, leaving his kidney un­
bought. "Mr. Bloom pointed quickly. To catch up
78
 J A ME S J OYCE
and walk behind her it she went slowly, behind her
moving hams." But she turns in the other direction
and, baffled, he disparages to himself those charms
he is baulked of enjoying.
Walking home with his kidney he reads the
advertisement carefully. "Agendath Netaim:
planter's company." The project is to found an
earthly paradise on land to be bought from the
Turkish Government. The reader is invited to pay
ten marks down and his name is entered in the book
of the Union . and at once they begin to plant his
land with olives, oranges, almonds or citrons.
"Bleibtreustrasse 34, Berlin, W. 15. Nothing doing.
Still an idea behind it." His mind wanders again to
the sunlit east, its scented fruits, the growing,
plucking and grading of them, till a cloud over the
sun of Dublin darkens his vision of the Orient.
Agendath Netaim is one form of the Orient motive
of Ulysses.
Two letters and a postcard have been delivered
in his absence. One of the letters is addressed to
Mrs. Marion Bloom. "His quick heart slowed at
once. Bold hand. Mrs. Marion." He takes it to his
wife and when, a few minutes later, he takes in her
tea, he sees a strip of torn envelope peeping from
under her pillow.
" 'Who was the letter from ?' he asked . . . .
" 'Oh, Boylan,' she said. 'He's bringing the
programme.'
" 'What are you singing ?'
" 'La ci darem with J. C. Doyle,' she said, 'and
Love's Old Sweet Song.' "
Marion has mislaid her book and Bloom finds it
"sprawled against the bulge of the orange-keyed
chamberpot." A word is bothering her, "metem­
psychosis," and Bloom is trying to explain the
meaning of it to her when her sensitive woman's
79
 J AMES J O YCE

nose smells burning in the kitchen. He hurries back

to kidney and breakfast.
While eating, he reads the letter to himself from
his daughter, Milly. Her birthday was on the
fifteenth and she thanks him for the birthday
present. She is pleased with her job as a photo­
grapher's assistant. Among other things she
mentions that a young student, Alec Bannon, is
paying her attentions. Mulligan's bathing com­
panion is mentioning the same thi::ig at about the
same time, only from Bannon's angle, at the bathing
cove, a few miles away. Bloom thinks of her birth,
of the birth and death of his son, of her job and her
approaching sexual experience. It's good she has a
job. As for her sex, she must look after herself.
There is thunder in the air. "He felt heavy, full :
then a gentle loosening of.his bowels."
There are two toilet conveniences in Bloom's
house. One of these is at the end of the garden and
this he prefers. He prefers, too, the printed page to
the rolled up scroll. On his way to the jakes he
notices the infertility of the garden. It needs
manuring. Seated, he reads the prize story in Tit­
Bits, "Matcham's Masterstroke," by Philip Beaufoy,
of the Playgoers Club. "It did not move or t:mch
him but it was something quick and neat." He
notes that it "begins and ends morally." And, "he
envied kindly Mr. Beaufoy who had written it and
received payment of three pounds thirteen and six."
Could he write one himself or in collaboration with
Marion? One fears that he couldn't, for his mind
runs on subjects in which the public isn't interested:
his wife, her sayings, her mannerisms, her impresario,
Ponchielli's ballet, The Dance of the Hours. His sense
of reality is too strong. In any case, since r 904 the
verdant one has far outdistanced its golden and
scarlet rivals. It is fast going highbrow. Neither
8o
 JAMES J OYCE

Philip Beaufoy's contributions nor Bloom's would

now stand a chance against those of the great
names of our best sellers. "In the bright light,
lightened and cooled in limb, he eyed carefully his
black trousers, 'the ends, the knees, the houghs of the
knees. What time is the funeral? Better find it out
in the paper." The bells of George's Church strike
three-quarters. Listening to the overtones following
on through the air, Bloom says to himself, "Poor
Dignam."
As this day demands of Bloom the best of his
qualities the event narrated is of the highest
importance. Were the state of his bowels otherwise,
"the cloudie isle with hellish dreeriment would soon
be filled and thousand fearful roumours." Bloom's
moral staying power is rooted in his body's regularity.
The Calypso episode ends and the Lotus Eater s
begins. Bloom has left Eccles Street and is walking
soberly along Sir John Rogerson's Quay. Dignam's
funeral is due to start at eleven from Sandymount.
Bloom has to call at Westland Row post office,
which lies on his way. There should be time to spare
for a bath. It is a warm morning and the pores of
the city exude a sickly odour of dope.
"By Brady's cottages a boy for the skins lolled, his
bucket of offal linked, smoking a chewed fagbutt. A
smaller girl with scars of eczema on her forehead
eyed him, listlessly holding her battered cask hoop."
Shall fatherly Bloom warn him against the evils
of the toxic weed ? "Oh let him ! His life isn't such
a bed ofroses !"
The window of the Belfast and Oriental Tea
Company in Westland Row reminds him that he
must order some tea from Tom Kernan. He takes
off his hat to the warmth of the morning and inhales
the sweet scent of hair oil. His poste restante card is
tucked away in the leather headband. Vaguely he
81
 J A MES J OY C E
remembers that he has seen somewhere the picture
of a man lying on his back on the water, reading
under a spanned parasol. "Couldn't sink if you
tried: so thick with salt. Because the weight ofthe
water, no, the weight of the body in the water is
equal to the weight of the . . . What is weight
really when you say tht weight? Thirty-two feet
per second, per second. Law of falling bodies: per
second, per second." Tea, with its fragrant associa­
tions, hair oil perfume, and the massive formula for
the law of gravitation slightly numb the mind of
Bloom.
He presents his card at the grille of the P.O.,
Westland Row, and, while waiting, looks at the
recruiting posters showing ,soldiers in the distinctive
uniforms of their regiments. The clerk hands him a
letter addressed Henry Flower, Esq. He takes it and
turns again to the poster. "Where's old Tweedy's
regiment? . . . There he is: Royal Dublin Fusiliers.
. . . Maud Gonne's letter about taking them off
O'Connell Street at night : disgrace to our Irish
capital. . . . Half baked they look: hypnotised
like."
While he is discreetly opening the letter in his
pocket outside the post office he sights M'Coy,
whose wife also sings. Reluctantly he listens to the
talkative man explaining at great length how he
came to hear of the death of Paddy Dignam.
Round M'Coy's head he sees an outsider pulled up
before the door of the Grosvenor and a handsome,
well-dressed woman waiting while the porter hands
up the luggage and her male escort fumbles for
change. Barely listening to the drone of M'Coy's
voice, he watches intently for the treat of seeing the
rich thoroughbred woman get up on her equipage.
In spite of her aloof air she knows he is looking. But
he is baulked of his vision of silk stockings and what
82
 JAMES J OYCE
not. "A heavy tramcar honking its gong slewed
between." He mentally curses the tram-driver
for his untimeliness and . turns with more polite
attention to M'Coy. Attention is needed, for
M'Coy begins to tell him that his wife has an
engagement to sing and M' Coy is a confirmed valise
borrower. Bloom defends his valise adroitly, hinting
at the same time at the professional eminence of
Marion. " 'My wife too,' he said. 'She's going to
sing at a swagger affair in the Ulster Hall, Belfast,
on the twenty-fifth.' " At parting, he promises to
put M'Coy's name down on the list of mourners at
Dignam's funeral. He is glad to be rid of M'Coy, but
the glamour of the rich dame has drugged him into
forgetting to work M' Coy for a free pass to
Mullingar.
He returns to the letter, but faces an advertise­
ment hoarding so as to be able to keep an eye on the
vanishing figure of M' Coy. Advertisement is also a
drug . It flatters and numbs till the victim walks
meekly to the sales counter. Mrs. Bandman Palmer
is playing Leah that night. The night before she
played Hamlet. Ophelia's suicide reminds him of
his father's death from an overdose of aconite. He is
glad that he didn't go into the room to look at his
father as he lay dead. He passes a cab rank where
gelded cab-horses are champing their oats in
patient quietism. A timber yard off Cumberland
Street promises seclusion for his letter. There is no
one in sight but a child playing marbles and a
b linking tabby cat watching the child. He reads:
"Dear Henry,
"I got your last letter to me and thank you very
much for it. I am sorry you did not like my last
letter. Why did you enclose the stamps? I am
awfully angry with you. I do wish I could punish
83
 JAMES JOYCE
you for that. I cal1ed you naughty boy because I
do not like that other world. Please tell me what
is the real meaning of that word. Are you not
happy in your home you poor little naughty boy?
I do wish I could do something for you. Please tell
me what you think of poor me. I often think of the
beautiful name you have. Dear Henry, when will
we meet? I think of you so often you have no idea.
I have never felt myself so much drawn to a man as
you. I feel so bad about. Please write me a long
letter and tell me more. Remember if you do not I
will punish you. So now you know what I will do
to you, you naughty boy, if you do not write. Oh
how I long to meet you Henry dear, do not deny
my request before my patience are exhausted.
Then I will tell you all. Good-bye now, naughty
darling. I have such a bad headache to-day and
write by return to your longing
'' MARTHA.
"P.S. Do tell me what kind of perfume does
your wife use. I want to know."
Bloom passes on, reflecting on a probable meeting
with Martha. So far the affair has been carried on
poste restante, Bloom using for the purpose the
"beautiful name" of Flower. The complications
involved incline him to prudence. But her name
recalls to him a picture he once saw of Martha and
Mary. It is evening and Mary listens entranced
while Martha prepares the meal. '"She listens with
big dark soft eyes. Tell her: more and more: all.
Then a sigh: silence. Long long long rest.''
He tears up the compromising envelope and
throws the shreds of paper away under a dark rail­
way arch. A goods train laden with barrels of porter
clanks overhead. Musing on the fortunes of the
Guinness family and on the great vats and thirsts out
84
 J A M. E S J O Y C E
of which they sprang, Bloom reachs All Hallows
Church. "The cold smell of sacred stone called
him." The odd contrast of religious symbols strikes
him : tranquil and entranced Buddha, suffering and
bleeding Christ. He defends the integrity of his own
mind against the mass suggestions of religion. "Shut
your eyes and open your mouth. What ? Corpus.
Body. Body. Corpse. Good idea the Latin.
Stupefies them first. . . . Rum idea : eating bits of
a corpse why the cannibals cotton to it. . .
There's a big idea behind it, kind of kingdom of
God is withm you feel. First communicants. Hoky­
poky penny a lump. Then feel all like one family
party, same in the theatre, all in the same swim. . . .
BI.ind faith. Safe in the arms of kingdom come.
Lulls all pain. Wake this time next year." He
notes the ineffectiveness of religious observances to
restrain criminals (witness Carey, the Invincible, a
regular communicant) , but to the Church's credit
he places Benedictine and green Chartreuse and the
fact that at times it has fostered the fine arts. He
admires its purposefulness as a. business institution.
From "the cold smell of sacred stone" to the
"keen reek of drugs, the dusty dry smell of sponges
and loofahs." He calls at a chemist's shop to get
some skin lotion made up for Marion and buys a
tablet of lemon soap, to be paid for when he comes
back for the lotion. On leaving the shop he runs
into Bantam Lyons, an ardent supporter of book­
makers and thoroughbreds. It is Gold Cup day at
Ascot. Bass's great mare, Sceptre, is running. Lord
Howard de Walden's Zinfandel is fancied. The
French horse, Maximum II, is considered to have a
chance. Lyons excitedly asks for a sight of Bloom's
Freeman's. His intrusion is unwelcome to Bloom,
who tells him he can keep the paper: he was just
about to throw it away. The tip is clear. Throw-
85
 JAMES JOY C E

away is an outsider. Bantam Lyons returns the paper

and rushes off. Luckily for his bookmaker he doesn't
back Throwaway. He is the classic punter who
always swears he will back his own fancy next time
and for ever takes expert advice instead.
The warm. weather pleases Bloom. " Cricket
weather. Sit around under sunshades. Over after
over. Out. They cant play it here . . . Donny­
brook fair more in their line." Cricket still had
its agreeable lotus flavour m I 904. There was no
body line or barracking dispute in those days.
As a boy Joyce ran and hurdled but I have never
heard him talk of track athletics. He was never a
games-playing man. The game of cricket, how­
ever, does interest him. A page of his Work in
Prog:es_s is written in an idiom suggestive of cricket
rem1mscences.
"And her lamp was all askew and a trumbly
wick-in-her, ringeysingey. She had to spofforth, she
had to kicker, too thick of the wick of her pixy's
loomph, wide lickering jessup the smoky shiminey.
And her duffed coverpoint of a wickedy batter,
whenever she druv behind her stumps for a tyddlesly
wink through his tunnilcleft bagslops after the rising
bounders yorkers, as he studd and stoddard and
trutted and trumpered, to see lordherry's black­
hams had read bobbyabbels, it tickled her innings
to concert pitch at kicksoclock in the morm."
The dreamful suggestion to which Bloom finally
succumbs is that of a hot bath. "He foresaw his pale
body reclined in it at full, naked, in a womb of
warmth, oiled by scented melting soap, softly
laved." Ink smeared newsprint, greatest dope of
all, he has not looked at. He smelt it only.
Hades follows The Lotus Eater s. The under world
into which the hero and his companions descend is
Glasnevin cemetery. Dignam's house is in Sandy-
86
 JAMES JOYCE
mount, on the opposite side of the city. Here
Bloom enters the mourners' coach. There are
three other occupants: Jack Power, Ma:rtin Cunning­
ham and Simon Dedalus. Simon's wife, Stephen's
mother, died but recently and they are travelling to
the place where she lies. Martin Cunningham is an
intelligent, kindly man, whose face suggests that of
Shakespeare. His wife is a drunkard and ruins him
by drinking up one home after another. Together
with Jack Power he figures in the story Grace in
Duhliners in the friendly conspiracy against the
drinking habits of Tom Kernan. Simon Dedalus is
described by his son in A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man: "A medical student, an oarsman, a
tenor, an amateur actor, a shouting politician, a
small landlord, a small investor, a drinker, a good
fellow, a storyteller, somebody's secretary, some­
thing in a distillery, a taxgatherer, a bankrupt and
at present a praiser of his own past." Tom
Kernan, with Hynes of the story, Ivy Day, are
following in another coach with Ned Lambert.
They are trundling along past Watery Lane when
Mr. Bloom sights young Stephen and calls the
attention of Simon to his son. A swerve of the
carriage unsights Simon Dedalus, who falls back
in his seat and begins to curse Stephen's associates,
particularly Mulligan. He will write to Mulligan's
aunt about it. Mulligan's aunt thinks that Stephen
is leading the Buck astray and will write to Stephen's
father about it. Bloom's thoughts stray to his own
boy, who died, and he envies Simon the possession
of such a promiseful namebearer. Grand canal,
gas works, dog's home: and he remembers his
father's dying wish that he should be kind to the old
dog, Athos.
From his side of the carriage Martin Cunningham
greets an acquaintance on the street. It is Blazes
87
 JAMES JOYCE

Boylan. Mr. Dedalus salutes and Boylan's straw

hat flashes a reply from the door of the Red Bank.
The bold hand of Marion Bloom's organiser and
associate. "Mr. Bloom reviewed the nails of his left
hand, then those of his right hand. The nails, yes.
Is there anything more in him than they she sees?
Fascination. Worst man in Dublin. That keeps
him alive. They sometimes feel what a person is.
Instinct. But a type like that. My nails. I am just
looking at them: well pared." His momentary
embarrassment thus covered, Mr. Bloom answers
readily and urbanely their questions about the
concert tour.
The bent form of a notorious moneylender near
the O'Connell statue brings a welcome change of
subject. Bloom begins to tell the story of Reuben
Dodd's son, who, when ordered by his father to go
to the Isle of Man out of reach of a designing
female, jumped into the Liffey. Martin Cunning­
ham brusquely thwarts Bloom's effort and tells the
story himself. The laugh gives them qualms of
conscience, but they reflect that Dignam wouldn't
grudge them their little joke. He was a good fellow.
His death was due to apoplexy brought on by over­
drinkmg. Bloom thinks sudden death is . the best
death, swift and painless, but a silence of disagree­
ment follows his remark. His commonsense
paganism shocks their religious prejudice.
'' 'But the worst of all,' Mr. Power said, 'is the
man who takes his own life.' " Martin Cunningham
tries to change the subject. He is the only one of
Bloom's companions who knows that Bloom's father
died of aconite poisoning. In any case, he claims a
charitable judgment for him who dies by his own
hand. Bloom is unable to understand the harsh
Christian condemnation of suicide.
Their carriage drives into a drove of cattle and
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 J AME S JOY C E

Bloom comes back to his idea of running a tramline

from the Parkgate to the quays by way of the North
Circular. They pass over the Royal Canal, Cross­
guns Bridge, as a barge is being locked through. A
stonecutter's yard, the turn to Finglas Road, the
high railings of Prospects, flickering of tombstones
through the trees, remind them that they are near the
end of their journey. At the cemetery gate a
general reshuffle takes place. Bloom falls back with
Tom Kernan and discusses with him the destination
of the Dignam children. Ned Lambert talks to
Simon Dedalus of a whip-round to cover their
immediate needs. A former employer of Dignam's,
John Henry Menton, solicitor, present at the
funeral, has put his name down for a quid.
At the door of the mortuary chapel Bloom looks
down with pity on the thin neck of Dignam's eldest
boy in front of him. Inside all kneel, Bloom on one
. knee only and that protected from the dusty floor by
his Freeman's. He listens unmoved to the service for
the dead. His mind is proof against the pathos of
religion, but, seeing that some rite is necessary, as
well this as another. On the slow procession to the
grave he again walks with Tom Kernan, who was
once a Protestant and still prefers the more homely
Protestant burial service in the language . they all
understand.. But to Bloom's humane materialistic
mind the "resurrection of the body" is a comic idea.
It may bring comfort to the living, but it brings
none to the dead. "Knocking them all up out of
their graves. Come forth, Lazarus ! And he came
fifth and lost the job. Get up ! Last day! Then every
fellow mousing around for his liver and his lights
and the rest of his traps. Find damn all of himself
that morning. Penny weight of powder in a
skull. . . . " John Henry Menton asks who is that
man walking with Tom Kernan. He is told that it
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 J A ME S JOYCE
is Bloom, husband of Marion Bloom, born Tweedy.
" 'In God's name,' John Henry Menton said,
'what did she marry a coon like that for ? She had
plenty of game in her then.' "
Bloom's thoughts at the graveside are of the same
shrewdly human commonsense order. He is not
overmuch awed by death. It is just one of the facts of
life. How all nations and races meet it with different
beliefs and pieties, how dead things feed the living:
all that is just natural. Dying is the difficult thing.
He imagines a death-chamber, a dying man who
can't believe that at last his turn has come, delirium,
the priest, death. "Gone at last. People talk about
you a bit: forget you. Don't forget to pray for him.
Remember him in your prayers. Even Parnell.
Ivy day dying out. Then they follow: dropping
into a hole one after the other." Hynes, the
Parnellite of fl!)I Day, comes round to get the names
of those present for the paper. He doesn't know
Bloom's christian name. Bloom supplies it and at
the same time fulfils his promise to M'Coy to have
his name put down: Both Hynes and Bloom have
seen an unknown man in a macintosh hanging
round-evidently a melancholy person who takes
his morbid pleasure in graveyards and such places.
He has disappeared as if by magic. Hynes asks his
name.
" 'Macintosh. Yes I saw him, ' Mr. Bloom said.
'Where is he now ?'
" 'M'Intosh, ' Hynes said, scribbling. 'I don't
know who he is. Is that his name ?' " Bloom tries to
shout a correction to his colleague, but Hynes is out
of earshot.
Hynes proposes to some of the mourners a visit to
Parnell's grave. Bloom, unheeded, follows on
behind them. Why not put people's trades on the·
tombstones instead of dates and pious texts? A bird'
go
 JAME S J OYCE
sitting ta mely on the branch of a poplar reminds
him that all graveyards are bird sanctuaries. And
if we want to remember the dead why not supple­
ment the photograph with gramophones of their
voices? An obese, grey rat toddles among the
pebbles of a crypt. Corpse is meat to him. Bloom
prefers cremation to burial but "priests are dead
against it." Coming to the cemetery gates he
reflects that each visit brings him nearer to his own
grave. But what of it? "Plenty to see and hear and
feel yet. Feel live warm beings near you. Let them
sleep in their maggoty beds. They are not going to
get me this innings. Warm beds: warm full­
blooded iife." He meets Martin Cunningham in
the company of John Henry Menton. Bloom
politely calls attention to a dent in the solicitor's
hat and is rewarded with a hostile stare. Martin
confirms Bloom's observation and at this John
Henry Menton puts the matter right with a curt,
"Thank you," not addressed to Bloom. Marion's
husband once had the better of a game of bowls
with him and he can't forget it
So far Bloom has prepared and eaten his break­
fast, has guessed at an intrigue of his wife's and has
carried on a little flirtation of his own. His body has
functioned normally. He has met a few acquain­
tances, has had a bath and has attended a funeral.
But all the time his mind has been busy. He has
noted the present and reacted to it and he has
remembered the past. He has walked and talked
and all the while he has been thinking. What
thoughts? Great or small? They were his own, the
natural expression of his being. Joyce, in Ulysses,
takes life as it is and represents it in its own material.
Violences of temperament apart, his art resembles
that of Rodin. He achieves the monumental through
the organic, through the swift seizing of an irifinite
91
 JAMES JOY C E
number ofcontours from the living model. There is
a saying of Rodin's to the effect that what is visible
in the human body is but a fraction of that which
lies below the surface. Each undulation is a
mountain peak the base of which lies below. As
with the human body at rest, so with the human
being in action. What a man does is only a part,
and that the smaller part, of his character. What
he thinks and dreams is the greater part. That
which is manifest in action is to the unacted part as
the visible peak of the iceberg to the submerged,
invisible mass.
The acts of the principal persons in Ulysses are
shown with the accompaniment of their unspoken
thoughts, memories, aspirations and the momentary
impress ofthe world upon them through their senses.
If we knew only their acts they would be no more
to us than ingenious automatons, walking, talking,
gesticulating mechanisms. They would remind . us
of that painting and sculpture which is a collection
ofgestures and grimaces. Borne along on the stream
of their consciousness are all sorts of material. The
present occuRations of the thinker, his distant
projects, recent and distant memories are supple­
mented by the s�ghts, sounds and smells around him,
by what he touches and tastes and by the well­
being or malaise of his body. All this complicated
mass of material is represented by Joyce as an
impressionist painter might have rendered a view
cross river-the foreground rushes, towpath and
bushes, the water itself, the reflections of sky and
opposite bank (church spire, roofs and trees) , the
boats and swans on the surface, the town and up­
ward sweep of the thither bank and the sky over it
all. It is to be noted that Bloom, Molly and Stephen,
the three persons above all whose silent thoughts are
recorded, each has his or her own peculiar character
92
 JAMES JOYCE

of thought: Stephen's, hither and thither darting,

swallow-like ; Bloom's, nose on the ground, like a dog
on the scent; Molly's, an oleaginous, slow-moving
stream, turning in every direction to find the
lowest level. Not all thoughts are in words, but all
other material is specialists' material. Words are
the substance of everybody's thoughts.
Joyce uses the interior monologue (the phrase
was coined by M. Valery Larbaud) principally in
the earlier episodes of Ulysses. Except through this
device it isn't easy to see how, given the one day,
plan of Ulysses, the past life of the people could have
been conveyed to us. As it is we know not only the
past, but the attitude of the people towards it, the
outer manner and the inner comment, social form
and the kind and degree of sensibility. It has been
called "a photographic representation of a stream
of consciousness." Why photographic? The word
looks like contraband negative. It is more like
impressionist paii;iting. The shadows are full of
colour; the whole is built up out of nuances instead
of being constructed in broad masses ; things are
seen as immersed in a luminous fluid; colour
supplies the modelling, and the total effect is
arrived at through a countless number of small
touches. Like impressionist art-any other art for
that matter-it is an effort to approach reality. The
conversations in Ulysses and in A Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man have been praised for their
vividness. Sometimes we might think that a
recording instrument had been hidden in the room
or bar and whisked away when it had served the
author's purpose. The Christmas dinner quarrel in
A Portrait of the Artist is a case in point. Bloom's talk
with M'Coy is another. No one said: "This is a
gramophone record of a real conversation." If a
dramatist is true to life it is said that the fourth wall
93
 JAMES JOYCE

was absent while his people held the scene, meaning

to say that the matter, the tempo, the accent ofJife
were there to perfection. The function of the
interior monologue is, of course, the same as that of
any monologue spoken on the stage-to make us
acquainted with the persons and aware of their
inner conflicts.
All writers of fiction do this in one way or another.
The interior monologue is simply a convenient and
intimate way. And although the device is largely
associated with Joyce's Ulysses he never claimed any
originality in the use 'of it. In the course of a con­
versation in his flat in the Universitatsstrasse Joyce
said to me :
"I try to give the unspoken, unacted thoughts of
people in the way they occur. But I'm not the first
one to do it. I took it from Dujardin. You don't
· know Dujardin? You should."
It was not until 1923 or ' 24 that Joyce met
Dujardin. By that time Joyce's acknowledgment
of his debt to the French writer was everywhere
known. M. Dujardin presented Joyce with a copy
of his book, Les Laur ier s Sant Coupes, reprinted after
thirty-five years of oblivion, containing the inscrip­
tion: "A James Joyce, maitre illustre, mais surtout · a
celui qui a dit a l' homme mart et enseveli: Lazare leve-toi."
Some years later I called at Joyce's flat while he
was writing on the flyleaf of the French Ulysse. He
showed me the flyleaf. On it stood : "A Edouard
Dujardin, annonciateur de la parole intericure. Le larron
impenitent, James Joyce."
Originality is in any case a much overrated
quality. If Joyce began by taking the hero and
incidents of the Odyssey as his example why should
he stop at a technical device? Where Joyce took it
he has said plainly enough. Who was first to invent
it is still a question. Most new things tum out to be
94
 JAMES JOYCE

as old as the hills. All the very latest sculpture

comes from past civilisations m Egypt, Central
Africa and Yucatan. Dutch pamters for a century
produced immortal paintings without inventing
anything new. And our great national poet
beautified himself and our tongue with stories and
technique taken wherever he could find them.
From Glasnevin cemetery Mr. Bloom goes to the
offices of the Freeman's Jo urnal. He is what is known
in our day .as a spacehound, an advertisement
canvasser. Really it should be spacetimehound,
seeing that he sells quantities of space for periods of
time. This is the Aeo lus episode. The newspaper
office is the Cave of the Winds and Myles Crawford,
editor-in-chief, is the god in charge of all the
zephyrs, breezes, gales and hurricanes of hot air that
blow out of it. It is squally weather. Mr. Bloom is
blown out of his course by head winds, but with
good seamanship keeps off a lee shore, and the calm
finds him in deep water with all spars and sails
intact. The episode is written in a style of all winds
except the reliable trade wind. Mainly it is puffy
and gusty. The whole is cut up into short fragments,
each one being headlined in the breezy manner of an
American sub-editor.
Alexander Keyes, tea, wine and spirit merchant,
has an ad. in the Freeman's Journal and he has
promised Bloom a renewal on condition that the
design is changed. He wants an allusion to his
name in the shape of a drawing of the crossed keys,
emblem of the Manx Parliament. To get as much
as possible for his money he wants also a par. in the
Saturday pink Telegraph, an associated journal.
Bloom'.g present task is to get consent to the
change from all concerned. He takes a cutting of
the Freeman's ad. from the advertisement clerk (who,
having no responsibility in the matter, says they can
95
 JAMES J OYCE

do Keyes a par. if he wants one) and makes for the

office of the foreman printer, Councillor Nannetti.
On the way he meets Joe Hynes, from Nannetti's
office, outward bound, and hails him. He tells
Hynes that the cashier is just going to lunch but
that if he hurries he'll catch him. This was not so
altruistic as it looked. Hynes owes Bloom three
shillings and Bloom's advice was intended as a hint.
Hopes of a sub filling Hynes's sails, he vanishes in
the direction of the cashier's office. The hint was
lost.
Bloom explains the idea to Nannetti amid the
clanking and roaring of the machines. Long use
has made them noiseless to the foreman printer.
" 'We can do that,' he said. 'Let him give us a
three months'·renewal.' " Bloom will get the design
of the crossed keys which has already appeared in a
Kilkenny paper, but is not too pleased with the job
of persuading Keyes to a three months' renewal.
The time element complicates matters. "Want to
get some wind off my chest first. Try it anyhow."
He decides against making a tram journey to
Keyes with .the chance of not finding him m. He
will first telephone in the office of the Evening
Telegraph. Outside the office door he hears laughter
and voices. Inside he finds Ned Lambert, Simon
Dedalus and Professor MacHugh. Ned Lambert is
reading some particularly flatulent nonsense about
the beauty of Ireland to the accompaniment of his
hearers' laus-hs and protests.
''" 'What 1s it ?' Mr. Bloom asked.
" 'A recently discovered fragment of Cicero's,'
r.rofessor MacHugh answered with pomp of tone.
Our Lovely Land.'
" 'Whose land ?' Mr. Bloom said simply."
A violently opening door hits Bloom m the back
with its knob and J. J. O'Molloy enters. He is a
96
 J AMES J OYC E
barrister with a dwindling practice, failing health
and many debts, come, as Bloom shrewdly surmises,
to raise the wind. The inner door flies open,
admitting Myles Crawford. "A scarlet beaked
face, crested by a comb of feathery hair." Simon
Dedalus suggests a drink to wash down Dawson's
superfatted prose and Bloom, seeing the coast clear,
steers neatly through the door of the sanctum to the
telephone. In the doorway, returning from the
phone, he collides with Lenehan entering with
sports tissues. Lenehan broadcasts his tip for the
Gold Cup, Sceptre, with 0. Madden up. Bloom
has heard on the telephone that Keyes is in Dillon's
auction rooms and he leaves with the editor's
blessing to fix up the crosskeys ad. Newsboys follow
in his wake, mimicking his awkward walk. The four
who are left are in the middle of a discussion on
Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Hebrew and modern
civilisation when Stephen appears in the company
ofO'Madden Burke, an occasional contributor, and
hands to the editor Mr. Deasy's letter on the foot and
mouth disease. Myles Crawford's suggestion to
Stephen that he shall write something for the paper
leads him through a conversational eddy to the great
feat ofjournalism of Ignatius Gallagher who cabled
to the .New York World the story of the Phcenix Park
murders.
Excitedly he turns over the Freeman's files and
describes to them Gallagher's brainwave. This super
journalist had used the letters of an advertisement
in the Week(y Freeman to cable a sketch map of the
scene of the crime, and the route taken by the
murderers, to the New York paper. In the middle
of his speech Bloom is reported on the phone and he
promptly orders that Bloom shall be told to go to
hell. As an epilogue to his story he pours scorn on
the younger generation of journalists without flair,
97
 JAMES JOYCE

of orators without eloquence. His mouth, curled in

disdain, reminds Stephen of his own poem com­
posed on Sandymount Strand:
On swift sail flaming
From storm and south
He comes, pale vampire,
Mouth to my mouth.
Bright coloured rhymes of ltalian verse-green, rose
and gold-mock the heavy colourmg of his own.
The Italian rhymes are gaily dressed girls dancing.
"But I old men, penitent, leadenfooted, under­
darkneath the night: mouth south : tomb womb."
J. J. O' Molloy takes up cudgels for the younger
generation. He cites the eloquence of Seymour
Bushe, who defended the accused in the Childs
murder case.
'' 'He spoke on the law of evidence,' J.J. O'Molloy
said, 'of Roman justice as contrasted with the
earlier Mosaic code, the lex talionis. And he cited
the Moses of Michelangelo in the Vatican. . . .
He said of it: that sto1'!)! effigy in frozen music, horned and
terrible, of the human form divine, that eternal symbol of
wisdom and prophecy which, if aught that the imagination
or the hand of sculptor has wro ught in marble of soul­
transfigured and of so ul-transfiguring deserves to live,
deserves to live.' "
Professor MacHugh caps his quotation of Seymour
Bushe with a speech by John F. Taylor, improvised
on the occasion of a debate on the lnsh language.
The subject of Bushe's eloquence was Roman and
Mosaic law: that of John F. Taylor defended the
use of the Irish tongue by reference to the Hebrew
affirmation of nationhood in Egyptian captivity.
But when Professor MacHugh has come io an end
Stephen has had enough oratory. His salary is
burning his pocket. His motion that the house do
adjourn for a drink is declared by self-appointed
98
 J AMES JOY C E

chairman Lenehan to be carried unanimously.

They went, presumably, to the Mooney's in Abbey
Street. They are already under way when Bloom
reappears in a great hurry. He has seen Keyes and
Keyes will renew his ad. for two months, but wants
a puff in both Freeman's and the Eveni!l,g Telegraph.
The lord of the airs is explosive. He despatches
Bloom to Keyes with a rude counter-message that
Bloom will not deliver. The patient vendor ofspace­
time allows the squall to pass, regarding with
solicitude the receding back view of Stephen's
relatively new but dirty boots. "Last time I
saw him he had his heels on view. Been walking in
muck somewhere. Careless chap. What was he
doing in lrishtown ?"
Stephen has also a story to tell and tells it to a full
audience on the way to Mooney's. Two poor old
dames on a day's outing climb to the top of Nelson's
pillar. They take with them brawn and bread to
eat and they buy four and twenty ripe plums from
a girl at the foot of the column for their thirst.
Sitting on the top platform of the monument they
look up at the statue of the "onehandled adulterer"
as they entitle the great English sea captain. But it
gives them a crick in the neck, so they turn to their
plums, slowly eating them and spitting the stones
through the railings on to the heads of the people
below, if any. "He gave a sudden loud young
laugh as a close . . . . 'Finished?' Myles Crawford
said." These are the two phases of Stephen's art, the
low-toned, elegiac verse that he speaks to himself
and the Rowlandsonesque sketch of the two elderly
Dublin dames. It is a realistic, grotesque sketch of
Dublin life and evidently it puzzles his hearers as
much as it pleases them. They expect a literary
point of some sort but there is none. The point lies
in the seeing of it.
99
 J A M ES J O YCE
One of the problems that confronted Joyce con­
tinually in the composition of Ulysses was the spatial
and psychological position of his hero, Leopold
Bloom. In the first three episodes he completely
dominates the foreground. In the fourth, Aeolus, he
wanders in and out. Sometimes in the book he is
right in the front of the stage. At others he is seen
only indistinctly among the supers or he has
vanished in the wings. In the fifth episode, the
Lestrygonians, he again holds the centre of the stage.
It is lunch time and there is no further business to be
done. Keyes must be left for the moment. The
greater part of the Lestrygonians is Bloom's unspoken
thoughts on his way to lunch. It differs from the
other interior monologue in substance and rhythm.
Its substance is coloured by the state of his body,
and the rhythm is that of the digestive organs, the
peristaltic movement.
A'l they go east Bloom goes south, riverwards. A
young Y.M.C.A. man has pushed into his un­
suspecting hand a handbill announcing the visit of
Dr. John Alexander Dowie. Indifferently regarding
"Blood of the Lamb," Bloom notes that God is
always asking for blood on some pretext or other.
"Birth, hymen, martyr, war, foundation of a
building, sacrifice." Just as regularly his professed
ministers ask for money. The year before it was
Torry and Alexander of Glory Song fame. Looking
along Bachelor' s Walk he sees Dilly Dedalus outside
Dillon's auction rooms, waiting for her fathe,r, and
pities the child for her tattered clothes and under­
nourished body. She is one of a large family, and
Bloom condemns that cruel and senseless theology
borrowed from the tribal necessities of his own race�
that commands the poor to bring unfeedable
mouths into the world. He flings the Dowie hand­
bill to the gulls off O'Connell Bridge, but they are
1 00
 JAMES JOYCE

not gullible enough to dive for it, so he buys them a­

Banbury cake. A placard pasted on a moored row­
boat catches his approving publicity eye. Quack
doctors' ads. pasted up in men's urinals are also
appropriately placed. Suppose Boylan were afflicted
with. . . . But he banishes the thought. A string
of sandwichboardmen heaves in sight on the other
side of the bridge. The letters on their tall white hats
spell H-E-L-Y-S. He once worked for the big
Dame Street stationer and printer and remembers
how his employer turned. down his excellent
publicity notions. The best one was to have a
transparent showcart with two smart girls in it
writing. "Smart girls writing something catch the
eye at once." That was in the early years of his
married life. The fun they had bathing the baby
daughter, the suppers and the chats at night.
"Stream of life" recurs in one form or another
throughout the Lestrygonians episode. Generation
after generation flowing from the cradle to the
grave. And the process is repeated on a small scale
by the human intestines daily taking in nourishment
and throwing out waste. In Westmoreland Street
he meets Mrs. Breen, an old flame of his. She is now
married to an elderly man suffering from persecution
mania. A practical joker has just sent him a post­
card bearing the words, U.P. : up, and he is running
round, getting legal advice with a view to claiming
ten thousand pounds damages from the unknown
who sent it. To change the subject Bloom asks after
their common friend, Mina Purefoy, and is told that
she has been in the lying-in hospital three days
expecting a baby. This is another family with
religion and a high birth rate, Protestant this time.
But Mrs. Breen catches sight of her husband
struggling with huge law books and hurries off to
look after him. Just before she goes one of the
IOI
 JAMES JOYCE

Dublin oddities of Ulysses passes them. It is Cashel

Boyle O'Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell, whose
form of harmless idiocy consists in walking outside
the lamp posts of the city at top speed, talking to
himself.
Mr. Bloom passes the offices of the Irish Times. It
was in this paper that, with ulterior motives, he
advertised for a young lady to assist gentleman with
literary work. The Martha correspondence is the
outcome of that advertisement. He thinks with a
sympathetic shudder of women's childbirth agony.
Why not twilight sleep? And why not a state
endowment at birth for every child as an insurance
against poverty and to give them a start in life at
the age of twenty-one? A squad of constables going
on their beats reminds him of a students' counter­
demonstration when Joseph Chamberlain was given
his degree in Trinity. An innocent passer-by on that
occasion, he was almost ridden down by mounted
policemen. He has no patience with the rebel
politics of youth. "Silly billies: mob of young cubs
yelling their guts out. Vinegar Hill. The Butter
exchange band. Few years time half of them
magistrates and civil servants. War comes on: into
the army helter-skelter: same fellows used to
whether on the scaffold high." Another aspect of
the stream of life is suggested by the constant pro­
cession of trams before Trinity's surly front.
"Trams passed one another, ingoing, outgoing,
clanging. Useless words. Things go on same; day
after day: squads of police marching out, back:
trams in, out. Those two loonies mooching about.
Dignam carted off. Mina Purefoy swollen belly on a
bed groaning to have a child tugged out of her.
One horn every second somewhere. Other dying
every second. Since I fed the birds five minutes.
Three hundred kicked the bucket. Other three
.102
 JAMES JOY CE
hundred born, washing the blood off, all are
washed in the blood of the l�mb, bawling
maaaaaa.''
He had just been thinking about Parnell in con­
nection with nationalist demonstrations and the
brother of the great chief passes on the other side
of the street. How like in form ; in action how unlike.
The chief used men as pawns for his cause. His
brother plays chess in a teashop. Another famous
Dublin figure passes: A.E. the poet. In homespun
tweeds he is pushing a bicycle with an ill-dressed
literary-looking lady at his side. Another coinci­
dence: one ofthe replies to his ad. in the Irish Times
came from Lizzie Twigg. Her literary efforts, she
said, had met with the approval of Mr. Russell.
Might this lady with the loose stockings be Lizzie
Twigg? He is now at the corner of Nassau Street
and Grafton Street and stops to look into the
window of Yeates and Son. Astronomy is Mr.
Bloom's hobby. He thinks of sunspots and of the
eclipse due later in the year. Parallax is a word that
bothers him. He might go out to Dunsink and talk
to the professor about it. A fortnight ago was new
moon and that was the night he was walking by the
J:olka with Marion and Boylan. No doubt they were
already flirting with touches of hands. He sees
Bob Doran (hero, timid and trapped, of the story,
The Boarding House, in Dubliners) sloping into the
Empire pub. M'Coy told him earlier in the day that
Doran was on one of his periodical binges. Some
years back the Empire was a theatre. "I was
happier then. Or was that I ? . . . Twenty-eight l
was. She twenty-three when we left Lombard
Street West something changed. Could 'never like it
again after Rudy. Can't bring back time. Like
holding water in your hand. . . . "
He is now in Grafton Street, smartest ofthe shop-
I03
 JAMES JOYCE

ping thoroughfares of Dublin. A shop window

dressed with women's silk petticoats and stockings
fills his mind with amorous longings and he turns
Combridge's corner still pursued by perfume of
embraces. Entering the Burton Restaurant, a
mixed stink of food and clatter of hurried eating
shatters his luxurious vision of silk-clad, perfumed
women's bodies. Lunchers are perched on high
stools at the bar, sitting at tables in the body of the
room. Bloom is appalled by the stink, clatter and
messiness of man-filled eating houses and, with a
face-saving pantomime of looking for a friend, turns
at the door and goes away. He almost becomes a
convert to vegetarianism. It is clean, causes no pain
to animals and is more aesthetic. ". . . Poor
trembling calves. Meh. Staggering bob. Bubble
and squeak. Butchers' buckets wobble lights. Give
us that brisket off the hook. Plup. Rawhead and
bloody bones. Flayed glass-eyed sheep hung from
their haunches, sheepsnouts bloodypapered snivel­
ling nosejam on sawdust . . . . " Bloom turns into
Davy Byrne's pub in Duke Street.
Davy Byrne's is still going strong and is the same
"moral pub" it was on June 16; 1904. The amiable
proprietor still "stands a drink now and then" but,
well advanced in years, is no longer to be seen
behind the bar in shirt sleeves, serving and counting.
The bar, too, is the same "nice piece of wood" on
which Bloom gazed with quiet admiration, except
that it has been shortened by a foot or two to make
room for a private bar at the Duke Street end.
Bloom calls for a Gorgonzola sandwich and a glass
of Burgundy. While he is dabbing mustard on his
cheese, Nosey Flynn, sitting at the counter, asks him
about the concert tour.
" 'Ay, now I remember,' Nosey Flynn said, put­
ting his hand in his pocket to scratch his groin.
1 04
 JAMES JOYCE

'Who is this was telling me? Isn't Blazes Boylan

mixed up in it?'
"A warm shock of air heat of mustard hauched on
Mr. Bloom's heart."
A sip of wine steadies him and he replies with
composure that indeed Boylan is managing the
tour. Flynn goes on to laud the astuteness of Blazes
as boxer manager and then proceeds to discuss the
chances of the horses engaged in the Gold Cup.
Bloom is no gambler and tenders no opinion. His
prelunch fleshly yearnings turn to recollections of
pleasures enjoyed. He remembers a day on Howth
Head with Marion. "Ravished over her I lay, full
lips full open kissed her mouth. Yum. Softly she
gave me in my mouth the seed cake warm and
chewed. . . . " The fine curves and material of the
bar woodwork fuse in his mind with the curves of
women's flesh. "Curves the world admires." He
resolves to call at the library museum and see for
himself how the sculptor deals with the back views
of goddesses. While Bloom is away in the rear of the
premises, Flynn and the publican discuss him.
With winks to his words Flynn tells Davy Byrne that
Bloom doesn't buy cream for his wife on the com­
mission he picks up canvassing ads. for the Freeman's
Journal. Bloom is a Mason and the craft help him.
The publican remarks that although he has seen
Bloom often he has never seen him the worse for
drink, and Flynn adds that when the fun gets too
hot Bloom will always consult his watch and vanish.
" 'He's not too bad,' Nosey Flynn said, snuffling
it up. 'He has been known to put his hand down
too to help a fellow. Give the devil his due. 0,
Bloom has his good points. But there's one thing
he'll never do/
"His hand scrawled a dry pen signature beside
his grog.
 J AMES J OY C E

" 'I know,' Davy Byrne said.

" 'Nothing in black and white,'' Nosey Flynn said.
"Paddy Leonard and Bantam Lyons came in.
Tom Rochford followed, a plaining hand on his
claret waistcoat}'
Bloom greets all with uplifted three finge� on his
way out. Bantam Lyons whispers to the others that
he has a tip from Bloom for the Gold Cup, but
doesn't tell them the name of the horse or how
Bloom gave it. He is alluding to Bloom's remark
that he was about to throw away his Freeman's
Journal. Lyons has yet to meet the professional
tipster, Lenehan, and be laughed off his fancy by the
book of form. In Dawson Street , on, his way to the
National Library, Mr. Bloom meets a blind stripling
and pilots him across the road to the corner of
Molesworth Street. A post office reminds him that
he must answer Martha's letter. He sees Sir
Frederick Falkiner going into the Freemasons' Hall
and thinks of the slating the soft-hearted judge gave
the crookback moneylender. But then, he is "really
what they call a dirty Jew." Near his goal in
Kildare Street he sights Blazes Boylan. A meeting
with his wife's lover would be most unwelcome,
especially as his cheeks are flushed with Burgundy.
To avoid the encounter he makes for the Museum
with quicker, longer strides, keeping his eye from
roving by searching for nothing in his pockets.
" I am looking for that. Yes , that. Try all
pockets. Handker. Freeman. Where did I? Ah, yes.
Trousers. Purse. Potato. Where did I?
" Hurry. Walk quietly. Moment more. My
heart.
" His hand looking for the where did I put found in
his hip pocket soap lotion have to call tepid paper
stuck. Ah, soap there! Yes. Gate. Safe! "
Joyce's first question when I had read a completed
I06
 JAMES J OYCE
episode or when he had read out a passage of an
uncompleted one was always: "How does Bloom
strike you?"
Technical considerations, problems of homeric
correspondence, the chemistry of the human body,
were secondary matters. If Bloom was first it was
not that the others were unimportant but that, seen
from the outside, they were not a problem. At about
the time of the publication of the Lestrygoniarzs
episode he said to me:
"I have just got a letter asking me why I don't
give Bloom a rest. The writer of it wants more
Stephen. But Stephen no longer interests me to the
same extent. He has a shape that can't be changed."
Bloom should grow upon the reader throughout
the day. His reactions to things displayed in his un­
spoken thoughts should be not brilliant but singular,
organic, Bloomesque. Joyce delighted in many of
the natural, quick sayings of his Greek friends in
Zurich, but all were too imaginative for his Dublin
Jew. Typical of Bloom's character is the thought
that occurs to him as he looks at the cat in th�
kitchen in Eccles Street. He first supposes that to
her he looks like a tower but corrects himself.
"Height of a tower? No, she can jump me. "
An infinite number of small touches builds up
Bloom's character: his guess at the sensibility of the
blind, his judgment of student politics, his simple
question, not ironically mtended, "Whose land?"
in the Telegraph office, his remembering how the
poplin industry came to Ireland, his taking note of
Stephen's relatively new but muddied boots, his
sympathetic talk with Mrs. Breen, his care to avoid
waking the sleeping horse, his nervous avoidance of
Boylan, his calmly unresentful acceptance of John
Henry Menton's and Myles Crawford's snubs, and
so on.
 JAME S J O Y CE
Joyce in Zurich was a curious collector of facts
about the human body, especially on that border­
land where mind and body meet, where thought
is generated and shaped by a state of the body.
Bloom is led · on to lunch by erotic visions. After
his bread and cheese and Burgundy he lives in
erotic memories. "Sun's heat it is. Seems to a
secret touch telling me memory. Touched his
sense moistened remembered."
"Fermented drink must have had a sexual
origin," said Joyce to me one day. "In a woman's
mout_h, probably. I have made Bloom eat Molly's
chewed seed cake."
I told him I had just read a German book in
which was described a tribal orgy on a South Sea
island. The drink was prepared by the women of
the tribe. They chewed a certain herb and spat the
pulp into a huge crock out of which the men then
drank.
Alluding once to the end of the first episode I said:
"You remember that H. G. Wells, in writing
about A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, says you
have a cloaca! obsession. What would he say to
this?"
"Cloaca! obsession !" said Joyce. "Why, it's
Wells's ·countrymen who build water-closets where­
ever they go. But that's all right. H. G. Wells is a
very appreciative critic of my writings. There's only
one kind of critic I do resent."
"And that is?"
"The kind that affects to believe that I am
writing with my tongue in my cheek."

108
 CHAPTER SIX

"DoN'T you think," said Joyce, "that early after­

noon is the time of greatest brain activity?"
I vaguely thought it wasn't so in my case but,
besides my own experience, I had no facts on which
to generalise.
"The brain", he said, "is the organ presiding over
Scylla and Charybdis. The Aristotelian and Platonic
philosophies are the monsters that lie in wait in the
narrows for the thinker."
This episode is foreshadowed when, on the way
to the bathing cove, Mulligan tells Haines that
Stephen has a Hamlet theory all his own. Haines,
ever ready to add something to his scrap book,
wants to hear it at once, but Mulligan protests:
"Wait till I have a few pints in me first," and calls
on Stephen to affirm that he couldn't state it on
less than three pints.· The reason Stephen gives is:
"We're always tired in the morning. And it is
rather long to tell." But his theory is with him all
day. Undertones of it creep into his monologue
on the beach at Sandymount, and his mind con­
stantly revert-s to it in the Telegraph office. He has a
rendezvous at the National Library, at any rate
intends going there, and it is there that he will
expound it. More or less subonsciously he -is
seeking for anything that will add to his argument
or give force to his exposition. When ]. J. O'Molloy
commands silence to give them a taste of Seymour
Bushe's oratory a line occurs to Stephen: "And in
the porches of mine ear did pour . " He notes
a lack of probability, and thinks: "By the way
1 09
 JAMES JOYCE
how did he find that out? He died in his sleep. Or
the' other story, beast with two backs?"
While Professor MacHugh is capping the elo­
quence of Bushe with that of John F. Taylor the
spirally upcurling smoke of cigarettes brings to his
mind the words from Cymbeline: "And let our
crooked smokes . . . " A few minutes later, on
the way to Mooney's : " 'You remind me of
Antisthenes,' the professor said, 'a disciple of
Gorgias, the sophist. It is said of him that none
could tell if he were bitterer against others or
against himself. He was the son of a noble and a
bondwoman. And he wrote a book in which he
took away the palm of beauty from Argive Helen
and handed it to poor Penelope.'
" 'Poor Penelope. Penelope Rich.' "
The question of brain activity in the early after­
noon is perhaps associated with the question of
lunch. A light lunch may stimulate, and a heavy
one retard it. Stephen's has consisted of the drinks
he has had in Mooney's with the journalists. He
has eaten nothing, and cannot have had fewer
than three drinks. The episode opens in the National
Library with Stephen facing an audience of four,
John Eglinton, Mr. Best, Mr. Lyster and A. E., the
poet, prepa:ed to expound his theory and sparring
for an opemng.
If in Hamlet more than in any of the other plays
is to be sought Shakespeare's own tragedy and
personality, with which of the characters is the
poet to be identified? General opinion answers:
with Prince Hamlet himself. Hamlet's passion and
despair are Shakespeare's own heart-cry. Stephen
holds, on the contrary, that Shakespeare is to be
identified with the ghost of the murdered king, the
part that, as actor, he himself played; Hamlet, the
prince, with young Hamnet Shakespeare, who died
I IO
 JAM E S JOYCE
at the age of twelve; Ann Shakespeare, born Hatha­
way, with the guilty queen; and Gilbert, Richard
and Edmund, the poet's brothers, with the murderous
usurper. Ann Hathaway was eight years older than
William Shakespeare, and Stephen assumes that she
took the initiative in their love. Under pressure
probably from down Shottery way, William did the
right thing by Ann, but left her after three years of
domesticity to seek his fortune in the capital. While
he was away his brothers became his wife's lovers.
The poet never forgot Ann's victory over himself-­
he is the Adonis overborne by the aggressive
Venus-and he never forgave Ann's marital infi­
delity. The birth of their granddaughter, Elizabeth
Hall, brought about a reconciliation, but that
reconciliation was neither deep nor lasting enough
to ;prevent his shaming her in his will with the
legacy of his second-best bed.
After two false starts John Eglinton gives him an
opening of which he takes advantage.
" 'He will have it that Hamlet is a ghost story,'
John Eglinton said for Mr. Best's behoof. 'Like the
fat boy in Pickwick he wants to make our flesh
creep. . . . '
" 'What is a ghost?' Stephen said with tingling
energy. 'One who has faded into impalpability
through death, through absence, through change
of manners. . . .' "
Stephen captures his hearers' imagination with
a picture of Shakespeare walking from the Hugue­
not's house in Silver Street to the theatre and in the
role of the spectre, addressing Burbage, who is
playing Hamlet, bidding him list.
" ' . . . To a son he speaks, the son of his soul, the
prince, young Hamlet, and to the son of his body,
Hamnet Shakespeare who has died in Stratford
that his namesake may live for ever.
III
 J AME S J OY C E

" 'Is it possible that that player Shakespeare, a

ghost by absence, and in the vesture of buried
· Denmark, a ghost by death, speaking his own words
to his own son's name (had Hamnet Shakespeare
lived he would have been Prince Hamlet's twin)
is it possible, I want to know, or probable that he
did not draw or foresee the logical conclusion of
those premises : you are the dispossessed son : I am
the murdered father : your mother is the guilty
queen, Ann Shakespeare, born Hathaway.' " ,
A. E. objects. The plays are there and they are
immortal. Let us enjoy and appreciate them and
leave the poet's private life alone. Stephen is hostile
to A. E. and all that he stands for and A. E. dislikes
Stephen. But Stephen's hostility cannot make him
forget that A. E. lent him a guinea and that he has
no reasonable prospect of paying it back. John
Eglinton's voice recalls him from his inner dialectic
with the observation that Ann "died for literature
at least, before she was born."
" 'The world believes that Shakespeare made a
mistake,' 'he said, 'and got out of it as quickly and
as best he could.' " Stephen affirms that the man of
genius makes no mistakes. "His errors are volitional
and are the portals of discovery." There is every
reason for supposing that Ann had beauty. The poet
who created the handsome shrew, Ka�herine, and
the much-loved Cleopatra knew what beauty was
in a woman. No doubt but that Ann was comely but
Shakespeare did not choose her. She chose him.
" '. . . She put the comether on him, sweet and
twentysix. The greyeyed goddess who bends over
the boy Adonis, stooping to conquer, as prologue to
the swelling act, is a boldfaced Stratford wench who
tumbles in a cornfield a lover younger than herself.' "
A. E. gets up to go. Contem.Ptuous comment, un­
spoken, on the mystic, his disciples, his practices
I I2
 JAMES JOYCE

patters through Stephen's mind while the leave­

taking speeches buzz in his ear. A useful lull in the
talk enables him to approach A. E. with a copy of
Mr. Deasy's letter. Will he publish it? A. E.
promises with ifs that it shall be published. "The
door closed behind the outgoer" and the discussion
is resumed.
John Eglinton and Mr. Best note that the plays of
the later period breathe a spirit of reconciliation.
" 'There can be no reconciliation,' Stephen said,
'if there has not been a sundering. . . . If you
want to know what are the events which cast their
shadow over the hell of time of King Lear, Othello,
Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, look to see when and
how the shadow lifts. What softens the heart of a
man, shipwrecked in storms dire, tried like another
Ulysses, Pericles, prince of Tyre? . . . A child, a
girl placed in his arms, Marina.' "
This is the birth of Shakespeare's first grandchild.
Mr. Best creates a diversion by mentioning the son­
nets. It proves to be a new path of approach to the
seduction part of Stephen's theory. Why did
Shakespeare send his fair young friend to woo for
him his lady coloured ill? She was more than
approachable. She was "a bay where all men ride,
a maid of honour with a scandalous girlhood. . . . "
Whence the feeling of inferiority evident in such a
delegation of his lover's risks and privileges? Why
was it not enough that he was a lord oflanguage and
successful in the affairs of the world? Stephen's
answer is that it was because Ann Hathaway's con­
quest of him had killed his belief in himself as a
lover.
" 'He was overborne in a cornfield first (ryefield I
should say) and he will never be a victor in his own
eyes after nor play victoriousiy the game of laugh
and lie down. Assumed dongiovannism will not
1 13
 J A ME S J O YCE

save him. No later undoing will undo the first

undoing. . . . He goes back, weary of the creation
he has piled up to hide him from himself, an old dog
licking an old sore. But, because loss is his gain, he
passes on towards eternity in undiminished person­
ality, untaught by the wisdom he has written or by
the laws he has revealed. His beaver is up. He is a
ghost, a shadow now, the wind by Elsinore's rocks
or what you will, the sea's voice, a voice heard only
in the heart of him who is the substance of his
shadow, the son consubstantial with the father.'
" 'Amen !' responded from the doorway."
It is the unwelcome Buck Mulligan come to
break the force of Stephen's argument and the spell
of his eloquence with a jest. There is a general
dispersal of interest during which Stephen's thoughts
come to rest on himself. He is poor, insufficiently
esteemed, unloved, and surrounded by half friends.
Mulligan comes towards him with the telegram he
sent to them, the quotation from Meredith's The
Ordeal of Richard Feverel: The sentimentalist is he
who would enjoy without incurring the immense
debtorship for a thing done. The Buck reproaches
him in the manner of Synge for not coming to the
"Ship" to stand them drinks as arranged. Then,
in his own voice, he assures Stephen that Synge is
out to murder him on account of a practical joke
of which Stephen is innocent. Stephen had met
Synge in Paris, and the clash of their temperaments
had produced heat but no light.
"Harsh gargoyle face that warred against me
over our mess of hash of lights in rue Saint-Andre­
des-Arts. In words of words for words, palabras.
Oisin with Patrick. Faunman he met in Clamart
woods, brandishing a winebottle. C'est vendredi
saint! Murthe.r ing Irish. His image, wandering,
he met. I mine. I met a fool i' the forest."
I I4
 JAMES JOYCE
Then the card of a caller is sent in to the librarian.
It is that of Bloom who wants to see the Kilkenny
People to copy the design for Keyes' advertisement.
Mulligan recognises him and gleefully tells Stephen
he has just seen the "sheeny" in the museum,
regarding intently the back view of a pla-,ter cast
of a Venus.
John Eglinton and Mr. Best want to hear more
about Ann Shakespeare. Hitherto they. had thought
of her as a patient Griselda, a Penelope stay-at­
home. Stephen draws for them a picture of life in
those days and supposes that the poet's amorous
adventures were many whatever his inward grief
might be. He concludes: "But all those twenty
years what do you suppose poor Penelope in
Stratford was doing behind the diamond panes?"
Buck Mulligan challenges him to name whom he
suspects. Stephen retorts that the burden of proof
lies with them. If they deny that Shakespeare
branded his wife with infamy in the fifth act of
Hamlet they have to explain why there is no mention
of her in the thirty-four years between the day she
married him and the day she buried him. Or only
one : while he was living in luxury in London she
had to borrow forty shillings from her father's
shepherd to pay a debt. True, his swansong, the
will, exists but in the first draft of it she is not
mentioned at all and when, perhaps under pressure,
he includes her in the final draft, he leaves her his
second-best bed. Shakespeare was a man who
loved money. From his debtors he exacted the
uttermost farthing, and "a man who holds so
tightly to what he calls his rights over what he calls
his debts will hold tightly also to what he calls his
rights over her whom he calls his wife."
He brings in his mother's name in the forest of
Arden, and her death inspired him to the scene
I I5
 JAMES JOYCE

with Volumnia in Coriolanus. We can identify the

girl women and the grown women, bold, capricious
and passionate. His own name appears slily in
corners of the plays and copiously m the sonnets.
But there are three other members of his family,
his brothers, Gilbert, Edmund and Richard. Ed­
mund and Richard appear in the plays as usurpers,
traitors and adulterers.
Stephen's argument is complete. Brothers Gilbert,
Richard anc:1 Edmund are the usurping king; the
long since d�ad Hamnet is the young Prince Hamlet;
Ann Shakespeare-Hathaway is the treacherous
queen; and the poet himself is the ghost of the
wronged "nd murdered king. Shakespeare was
overborne by a woman older than himself. He left
her and came to London. During his absence his
brothers supplanted him. Ann Hathaway ravished
him; Ann Shakespeare betrayed him. He could
forget neither her victory nor her treachery. His
son's death darkened his life, and the shadow of
that event spread over the great tragedies. The
birth of his granddaughter lightened his own
darkness and illumined the later plays.
Parallel with his Hamlet theory runs Stephen's
conception of the nature of fatherhood. This has
its bearing on his argument and on his own family
conflict. As it occurs in Scylla and Charybdis it is
the dominant father motive of the action of the
book, stated as a theological mystery. In Stephen's
words:
" 'A father is a necessary evil. He wrote the play
in the months that followed his father's death. If
you hold that he, a greying man with two marriage­
able daughters, with thirty-five years of life, nel
mezzo del cammin di nostra vita, with fifty of experience,
is the beardless undergraduate from Wittenberg,
then you must hold that his seventy-year-old
1 16
 JAMES JOYCE

mother is the lustful queen. No. The corpse of

John Shakespeare does not walk the night. From
hour to hour it rots and rots. He rests, disarmed of
fatherhood, having devised that mystical estate
upon his son. . . . Who is the father of any son
that any son should love him or he any son? . . .
The son unborn mars b eauty: b orn, he b rings
pain, divides affection, increases care. He is a male:
his growth is his father's decline, his youth his
father's envy, his friend his father's enemy. . . .
When Rutlandb aconsouthamptonshakespeare or
another poet of the same name in the comedy of
errors wrote Hamlet he was not the father of his
own son merely b ut, b eing no more a son, he was
and felt himself the father of all his race, the father
of his own grandfather, the father of his unborn
grandson who, by the same token, never was
b orn. . . . ' "
Asked by John Eglinton if he believes his own
theory, Stephen promptly says "No." Something
has gone wrong with the atmosphere. He came
expecting, probably, to get a commission for an
article in Dana, and now he sees that there is
no chance at all. Mulligan has spoilt the Stimmung,
and John Eglinton can't see why he should expect
payment for something in which he doesn't believe.
He leaves the library in Mulligan's wake. "I gall
his kib e." Mulligan is in high spirits, drinks in
prospect. Stephen is dull, washed out, tired.
Mulligan has written a sketch of a b awdy comedy
during the discussion and reads it to Stephen with
gusto but without success. The only thought of
which Stephen's tired mind is capable, apart from
certain stairwit connected with the discussion, is
prompted and shaped b y enmity to . Mulligan.
But the Buck goes on to jape over the listeners in
the lib rary, and persists in regarding Stephen's
1 17
 JAME S JO Y CE
theory as a big, colourful joke. Bloom, leaving the
reading-room, doubtless with a tracing of the
Kilkenny People design in his pocket, stares at Stephen
and greets him. Mulligan bids Stephen beware,
affecting to regard the "sheeny" as a pederast with
designs on the youthful hard.
"What do you think of Buck Mulligan in this
episode?" said Joyce when I returned the type­
script.
"He is witty and entertaining as ever," I said.
"He should begin to pall on the reader as the
day goes or ," Joyce said.
"The comic man usually wearies," I said, "if
he keeps it up too long. But I can't say that Buck
Mulligan wearies me."
"And to the extent that Buck Mulligan's wit
wears threadbare," Joyce continued, "Bloom's
justness and reasonableness should grow in interest.
As the day wears on Bloom should overshadow
them all."
"But Bloom?" I said. "In this episode he hardly
comes in at all."
"Bloom is like a battery that is being recharged,"
said Joyce. " He will act with all the more vigour
when he does reappear."
The Stephen of Scylla and Charybdis is the Stephen
of the Telemachus episode with which Ulysses begins.
His unspoken thoughts reveal to us the same mood
of hostility, suspicion, envy. The difference is that
the bored tiredness of eight in the morning has
given place to the energy and mental activity of
middle day. He is stimulated, too, with the three
drams of usquebaugh he has bought with Dan
Deasy's ducats and with the task of expounding a
pet theory to a resistant audience. His exposition
is accompanied by an undercurrent of thought
critical or contemptuous of his hearers. Why should
11 8
 JAMES JO Y C E
he b e critical and contemptuous of them? The
reason seems to be that he meditates greater work
than in these surroundings he can produce. He
must live and learn to find himself, but not here.
Early in the morning he announced to himself his
resolve not to sleep in the tower that night, which
means in fact that he will sleep there no more.
Now he augments that resolve with another. He
will leave Dublin altogether. Dublin is a round of
drink, women, talk : always repetition but no
growth. Even the force of his own pride is sapped
when he sees himself in the mirror of his associates.
Leaving the library with Mulligan, he thinks:
"Part. The moment is now. Where then? If
Socrates leave his house to-day, if Judas go forth
to-night. Why? That lies in space which I in time
must come to, ineluctably.
"My will: his will that fronts me. Seas between."
I never knew to what extent Joyce himself was
attached to the theory expounded by Stephen.
Presumably if he had never at any time held to it
he would not have made it the theme of an episode
in Ulysses. In one respect the Joyce of Zurich
resembled the Stephen of Scylla and Charybdis.
Shakespeare the man, the lord of language, the
creator of persons, occupied him more than Shake­
speare the maker of plays. And Stephen refers to
the sonnets as sugared.
So far no critic of Joyce's Ulysses has mentioned
Stephen's theory to approve or refute it. It seems
to me that as there is no direct evidence on the
question of the bard's lovemaking, Stephen's hypo­
thesis must be taken as reasonably likely, but not
more so than the contrary, for the passion of the
eighteen-year-old boy for the woman of thirty is
common enough. However, at eighteen, though
he probably had never loved a woman, Shakespeare
1 19
 JAMES JOYCE

certainly had experience of sexs eighteen years of it.

Everything that he was and everything that he was
to become was present in him, though he had many
miles and years to go to find it. The twig was bent:
the tree was inclined. If he was "overborne in a
cornfield," why was he overborne? Because he
willed it. In the language of Stephen, it was a
portal of discovery, but a portal to which he had
been advancing all the years of his life.
And what about the brothers? Here the evidence
entirely contradicts Stephen's hypothesis. Richard
was ten years William's junior, and Edmund
sixteen, so that by the time Richard was eighteen
Ann was thirty-six and by the time Edmund had
reached cornfield age Ann was forty-two. It is
generally supposed, too, that women aged more
quickly in the sixteenth century than they do in
our own day. But grant Ann exceptional vitality,
and even then Richard and Edmund look ve ry
unlikely as her lovers. They seem much more
probable playfellows for Susanna and Judith.
Gilbert, the possible brother rival in point of age, is
not mentioned in the plays. However, all men are
brothers, and as symbols of universal male rivalry
those of his blood might serve.
If Shakespeare neglected his family as bread
provider, if he neither visited Stratford nor sent
money there, how did Ann and their daughters
live? Goldsmith's notes or coin of the realm, sent
or taken, they must have had. If Ann really
. borrowed two pounds from her father's shepherd on
one occasion her credit must have been sound or the
good shepherd would never have lent it. Many an
embarrassed woman has borrowed money rather
than confess to having overspent.
Long absence, hints of poverty, second-best bed:
all this has an air of complete estrangement if
120
 JA M E S JOYC E
viewed from a certain angle, more, of absolute
enmity. But Stephen says there was a reconciliatiori
at the time Elizabeth Hall was born. It must have
been a reconciliation of a very superficial order if
the old grief persisted to the extent of permitting
Shakespeare to disinherit Ann. But did he? Second­
best bed sounds ungenerous, but was there a best
bed? "It is clear that there were two beds, a best
and a second-best, Mr. Second-best Best said
finely." It is, however, just possible that Susannah
took the best bed when she got married, and that
the second-best was willed to Ann to save it from
the deadly swoop ofJudith.
But all this is a matter for Shakespeare scholars.
What is indisputably true is the remark of John
Eglinton when Stephen's exposition was ended.
" 'The truth is midway,' he affirmed. 'He is the
ghost and the prince. He is all in all.' "
Stephen agrees, and in an eloquent parting
speech, hat and ashplant in hand, ready to go,
blows his own theory sky-high.
" 'He is,' Stephen said. 'The boy of act one is
the mature man of act five. All in all. In Cymbeline,
in Othello he is bawd and cuckold. He acts and is
acted on. Lover of an ideal or a perversion, like
Jose he kills the real Carmen. His unremitting
intellect is the hornmad Iago ceaselessly willing
that the moor in him shall suffer. . . . Every life is
many days, day after day. We walk through
ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men,
young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But
always meeting ourselves. . . .' "
All the persons represented, ghost king and
usurper, queen and young prince as well as Ophelia,
Polonius, Laertes, grave-diggers and all the rest,
draw their life from the same source, the poet's
imagination. If he is one of them he is all of them.
121
 JAMES JOY C E
He walked through himself and met them all, and
in that same country he found Caliban and Ariel,
witches and fairies, sluts, hoydens and fools. Had
the self through which he walked been solely his
own experience its population would be to others
of his race incomprehensible. Imagination sees,
remembers, foresees, divines. But that is not all.
It is a heritage of human experience bequeathed
from generation to generation and is therefore
knowledge as such. If the poet had not this inheri­
tance of race memory to draw upon he couli::l never
create a woman, so wide and deep is the gulf of
desire and misunderstanding set between man and
woman in the threescore years and ten of their
existence. In his own life he can experience much
but not everything. Life is too short. He regales
us with his inheritance. His own gains would be
insufficient for such a banquet. The elements of
what has been are within him; he sees what is and
divines what may be.
All of which leaves the riddle of Hamlet, Macbeth,
King Lear, Othello , Tro ilus and Cressida still unan­
swered. Shakespeare was myriad-minded. Millions
of strange shadows attended on him. But why so
often and at one time of his life the dark shadows of
betrayed king, banished lover, deserted father,
disillusioned friend? And why expressed with all
the force and poignancy of a personal grief? Metem­
psychosis, one of the recurring motives of Ulysses,
provokes a fancy. Those whom no doubts hinder
from pursuing the fancy might consider that
Michelangelo died in the year Shakespeare was
born. The fierce spirit who goaded him to create
his despairing Titans, his prophets and race­
fathers may have looked for a likely cradle when his
broken instrument was carried to the grave, and dis­
puted with the local earth gods the possession of a pen.
1 22
 CHAPTER SEVEN
To see Joyce at work on the Wandering Ro cks was to
see an engineer at work with compass and slide-rule,
a surveyor with theodolite and measuring chain or,
more Ulyssean perhaps, a ship's officer taking the
sun, xeading the log and calculating current drift
and leeway. Most ofthe characters of Ulysses appear
in Wandering Ro cks. Their actions are seen separ­
ately and simultaneously. Linking them together
in unity are the paths of Christ and C.esar. Christ
appears in the person ofhis servant, Father Conmee,
and C.esar in the person of C.esar's servant, the
Right Honourable William Humble, Earl ofDudley,
Lord Lieutenant-General and General Governor of
Ireland. These are the static forces of Church and
State, restraining the destructive forces ofwandering
anarchic individualism.
Christ and C.esar are here not in conflict-only
in opposition. What is God's and what is C.esar's
has been settled for them both long ago. They are
complementary and are so considered by the
Dubliners who salute them and who are, in their
turn, saluted or blessed by them. The one needs for
the exercise of his ministry the seGular peace
procured by kingly authority and the other exer­
cises his authority by virtue of institutions to be
protected. We know the thoughts ofFather Conmee.
They are prim, clean, benevolent thoughts. He
thinks hopefully ofthe vast number ofprecious souls
to be saved and of the mysterious variety of God's
familiar world. The cloudy summer sky pleases
1 23
 JAMES JO Y CE
him and the warm air. To children and grown-ups
of all classes he is equally benevolent. Of man's
"tyrannous incontinence" he thinks without con­
demnation. The ways of God are not our ways : and
how shall souls be saved if no bodies are made?
Also, being a priest, he thinks with pleasure of his
office and of its technical difficulties. He is God's
servant, but he is also a good workman pleased
with his job. The thoughts of the Right Honourable
William Humble, Earl of Dudley, are not revealed
to us. Both Christ and Cresar are on errands of
mercy bent. William Humble, Earl of Dudley, and
Lady Dudley, accompanied by Lieutenant-Colonel
Hesseltine, and with the honourable Mrs. Paget,
Miss de Courcy and the Honourable Gerald Ward
in attendance in another carriage, are driving to
Sandymount to open a bazaar in aid of funds for
Mercer's Hospital. Father Conmee is on his way
to Artane at the instance of Martin Cunningham
to see if he can get one of the Dignam orphans in
the Artane orphanage. Father Conmee makes his
way to Artane by way of Mountjoy Square, Great
Charles Street, the North Circular Road, North
Strand Road to Newcomen Bridge, and here takes
the tram as far as the Howth Road tramstop,
whence he pursues his way on foot along the
Malahide Road. The Lord Lieutenant-General and
General Governor of Ireland leaves the viceregal
lodge with his party and passes out of the lower
gates of Phcenix Park, proceeds along the north
quays past the Four Courts, crosses Grattan Bridge,
and so on to his destination by way of Dame
Street, Nassau Street, Merrion Square North,
Lower Mount Street, Northumberland Road and
Lansdowne Road.
Joyce wrote the Wandering Ro cks with a map of
Dublin b efore him on which were traced in red ink
1 24
 JAMES JOYCE

the paths of the Earl of Dudley and Father Conmee.

He calculated to a minute the time necessary for
his characters to cover a given distance of the city.
For this is peculiarly the episode of Dublin. Not
Bloom, not Stephen is here the principal personage,
but Dublin itself. Its houses, streets, spaces, tram­
ways and waterways are shown us, and the people
appear as sons and daughters and guests of the
city. All towns are labyrinths in which for the
townsfolk there are charted fairways; but we are
strangers in the town and can find our way only
by the exercise of attention and caution. While
working on The Wandering Rocks Joyce bought at
Franz Karl Weber's on the Bahnhofstrasse a game
called "Labyrinth," which he played every evening
for a time with his daughter Lucia. As a result of
winning or losing at the game he was enabled to
catalogue six main errors of judgment into which
one might fall in choosing a right, left or centre way
out of the maze.
Dublin was said to be the cardrivingist, tea­
drinkingest city in the empire, and teatime, with
its general reshuffle of the population on foot or on
trams is approaching. Among the normal citizens
drift the vague personages, freaks and naturals of
the city. The irritable blind piano-tuner is making
his way by touch through the maze. Cashel Boyle
O'Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell, "his stick­
umbrelladustcoat dangling," snakes his way round
lamp-posts towards an unknown destination. The
melancholy man with the macintosh, thirteenth
mourner at Dignam's funeral, drifts aimlessly
around, gnawing dry bread. Mr. Breen, suffering
from persecution mania and megalomania, is still
in pursuit of legal information which shall enable
him to bring an action for libel claiming ten
thousand pounds damages against an unknown
1 25
 JAMES JOYCE
practical joker. His faithfuJ wife attends him. Most
of the characters move from place to place on foot,
two of them, Almidano Artifoni, Stephen's music
master, and Father Conmee, take the tram, and
the viceregal cavalcade moves forward at a sharp
trot.
Apart from Father Conmee's journey to Artane
and the official viceregal drive to Sandymount,
there are eighteen pictures in the episode, each one
featuring the activities of one or several of the
characters. According to their directions and
velocities their position at any time is noted,. for
they are all regarded in a twofold sense. They are
human souls bound together by psychological ties,
as, for example, ties of family, religion, friendship,
enmity, citizenship, interest; and they are also
bodies, isolated masses of matter moving through
space. The viewpoint changes from one sentence to
another so that the reader must be continually on
the alert to follow the variations of scale and angle.
The view constantly changes from a close-up to
a bird's-eye view. A character is introduced to us
at close-up range, and suddenly, without warning,
the movement of another character a mile distant
is described. The scale suddenly changes. Bodies
become small in relation to the vast space around
them. The persons look like moving specks. It is a
town seen from the top of a tower. The spiritual
attributes of each person remain what they were,
but all, as individuals, become small in relation to
the city that contains them.
Thus, during a short talk between Corny Kelleher,
. undertaker and informer, and P.C. 57C, we are
told without warning: "Father John Conmee
stepped into the Dollymount tram on Newcomen
Bridge." He had saluted the constable a few
minutes previously.
 JAMES JOYCE
Maggie Dedalus is boiling shirts, using as fuel
for her copper some unpawnable books. Two
hungry schoolgirls, her younger sisters, come in,
and as she pours them out peasoup we read: "The
lacquey rang his bell. Barang!" This brings us to
Dillon's auction rooms, half an hour's walk distant,
where Dilly Dedalus hopes to meet her father.
While Blazes Boylan is buying fruit for "a lady
friend," "a dark..backed figure under Merchants'
Arch scanned books on the hawker's car." Bloom
is five minutes' walk away from his rival.
While Bloom is buying for Marion the Sweets of
Sin under Merchants' Arch, "on O'Connell Bridge
many persons observed the grave deportment and
gay apparel of Mr. Denis J. Maginni, Professor of
Dancmg, etc. " Professor Magmni is hardly a
stone's throw away.
Mr. Simon Dedalus and his daughter Dilly meet
outside Dillon's auction rooms, and at a certain
point in their conversation, " Mr. Kernan, pleased
with the order he had booked, walked boldly along
James's Street." Mr. Kernan is twenty minutes'
walk away from father and daughter.
As their conversation is about to come to an end,
"the viceregal cavalcade passed, greeted by obse­
quious policemen, out of Parkgate." Parkgate is
about a mile and a half from Bachelor's Walk.
Stephen Dedalus stands before a jeweller's and
watchmaker's shop : "Old Russell with a smeared
shammy rag burnished again his gem, turned it
and held it at the point of his Moses' beard. Grand­
father ape gloating on a stolen hoard.
"And you who wrest old images from the burial
earth! The brainsick words of sophists : Antisthenes.
A lore of drugs. Orient and immortal wheat stand­
ing from everlasting to everlasting.
"Two old women fresh from their whiff of the
127
 J A M ES J OYC E
briny trudged through Irishtown along London
b ridge road, one with a sanded umbrella, one
with a midwife's bag in which eleven cockles rolled."
The two old midwives, Stephen's beach com­
panions, have just left Sandymount shore. Stephen
is half an hour's walk away in the centre of the
town.
Mr. Dedalus and Father Cowley meet Ben
Dollard on the metal bridge just as, ten minutes'
walk away, " Cashel Boyle O'Connor Fitzmaurice
Tisdall Farrell, murmuring, glassyeyed, strode past
the Kildare Street Club."
The serviable Martin Cunningham comes out of
Castle Yard Gate, the interests of the Dignam
family in mind, when, "Bronze by gold, Miss
Kennedy's head by Miss Douce's head, appeared
above the crossblind of the Ormond Hotel." There
is a leisurely three minutes' walk between the
sympathetic Mr. Cunningham and the ladylike
b armaids.
The tidal waterway, the Anna Liffey, mother of
Dublin, plays as ever her part in Joyce's Dublin.
As a creative force she is older and greater than
Christ or Cresar. If Christ left Dublin the city would
still exist. Man can invent fresh gods as he needs
them and new gods would replace the old. If the
hand of one Ca:sar let fall the reins, the hand of
another would take them up. A committee of
public safety or a representative republic can rule
as firmly and well as King Edward VII. But if Anna
Liffey deserted Dublin, Dublin would cease to
exist. On her outgoing waters she bears the Elijah
handbill thrown away by Bloom at lunchtime off
O'Connell Bridge. While the Dedalus sisters are
eating their peasoup, "a skiff, a crumpled throw­
away, Elijah is coming, rode lightly down the
Liftey, under Loopline bridge, shooting the rapids
1 28
 JAM E S JO Y C E
where water chafed around the bridgepiers, sailing
eastward past hulls and anchor chains, between
the Customhouse old dock and George's quay."
And later, while Mulligan and Haines are spooning
their melanges, "Elijah, skiff, light crumpled throw­
away, sailed eastward by flanks of ships and
trawlers, amid an archipelago of corks, beyond
new Wapping Street, past Benson's ferry, and by
the three-masted schooner Rosevean from Bridg­
water with bricks." The throwaway is a further
mile seaward, outward bound on the ebbtide.
As with the town, so with the people, the time,
the object. An organised sensibility and a good
memory go to the just recognition of identity.
Similarity of names must not confuse us. Shadows
must not be mistaken for substances. Past time
must be recognised for past time. The same name
may be used to designate different persons or things.
Mr. Bloom, whose father changed his name by
deed poll from Virag to Bloom must not be confused
with Mr. Bloom, the dentist, nor Father Conmee
with Don Jon Conmee. Ben Dollard has nothing
to do with Dollard, the printer. Alderman Cowley
is not the Father Cowley who stands in fear of the
bumbailiffs set upon him by Reuben J. Dodd, the
moneylender. Mr. Kernan thinks he sees Ned
Lambert's brother over the way, but both are
moving, and the sun on the windscreen of a motor­
car hinders accurate observation. Bloom and
Stephen are both dressed in black, and both pore
over bookstalls. M'Coy and Lenehan, seeing
Bloom at the bookstall, conclude that he is looking
for a book on astronomy, which they know to be
his hobby, but Bloom in reality is looking for an
erotic book suitable for the literary taste of his wife.
Subsheriff Long John Fanning ascends towards
Subsheriff Long John Fanning in the mirror.
1 29
 J AME S J O Y C E
Young Patrick Dignam, on his way home with a
pound and a half of pork steaks for the funeral
guests, sees an exciting placard advertising a
welterweight boxing match, Myler Keogh v. Sergt.­
Major Bennett, and makes plans to evade parental
control and go and see it. Then he notices that the
fight has already taken place. Lenehan drops into
Lynam'·s office to enquire about Sceptre's starting
price and meets there Bantam Lyons, who is about
to back Throwaway, tipped him earlier in the day
by Bloom "in the dark language of prophecy."
Lenehan puts Lyons off his bet. Backing a system as
we did he would have lost just the same.
Mr. Wyndham Lewis, in a brilliant but negative
essay, has reproached Joyce with the vast amount
of local time detail in Ulysses. But if the artist is not
to be the abstract and brief mirror of his own time,
of what time is he to be mirror and abstract? The
personages he creates can hardly exist in a timeless,
spaceless vacuum. All characters in fiction have
appeared in the dress and social organisation of
their time from Burnt Njal to Bloom. Only the
fairy story begins, "Once upon a time" with people
dressed in timeless garments going on from one
adventure to another in unsurveyed places. The
timeplace of Dostoevsky's dreams of bad con­
sciences was tsarist nihilist Russia. Balzac con­
stituted himself social historian ofrestoration France.
L' Education Sentimentale is second republic, second
ernp;re. Dickens .is mid-nineteenth century petit­
bourgeois England. Ibsen's characters are as locally
late nineteenth century Norwegian as they are
universal. And Chaucer's pilgrims are of his own
day. Time, history, define the conflict and give to
character its local habitation. Joyce's time is 1 904.
His Dubliners wear the clothes, drink the ale, eat
the bread provided by the brewer, baker and tailor
1 30
 JAMES JOYCE

of their available place and time, and they talk the

politics of early Sinn Fein days. He couldn't very
well make them eat, drink, and wear nameless beer,
bread and clothes, and talk eternal verities homeless
in time. Virtue and vice, wisdom and folly, have
always worn garments woven upon time's roaring
loom. The one question that matters is : Does
Joyce display or hide the shapes of his figures with
the time detail of his day? To me his figures stand
out starkly against a background of things and
happenings. It is all a question of aesthetic judg­
ment and "how you see it," but everything depends
on it.
There is a second sense in which Joyce, as in
The Wandering Rocks, and in varying degrees in all
other episodes in Ulysses, is greatly interested in
time: that is, in the time of day. As Bloom says,
"Time is the time the movement takes." And
Joyce, having only seventeen hours at his disposal,
was obliged to use them with the logic and economy
of the dramatist. With the exception of Stephen,
who is concerned with time as the medium in
which his destiny unfolds and who hates past time
because it would bind him with present duties, all
the characters in Ulysses have just that social time
sense that is part of the general social mentality of
the period, and no more. This arises out of the
necessity for co-ordinating their daily social move­
ments. It is a purely technical thing, born of
mechanical development. James Watt invented
the steam engine, and the steam engine begat the
locomotive, and the locomotive begat the time­
table, forcing people to grapple with its complexities
and think in minutes where their great-grandfathers
thought in hours. All their yesterdays, that in an
earlier age would have been quietly buried in the
hope of a glorious resurrection as myth, lie em-
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 JAMES JOYCE

balmed in files of newspapers and snapshot albums.

They have suffered the influence of the penny post,
telegraph and telephone-all social institutions
working to a close time-table. But the principal
element in forming that social time sense is the
means of locomotion. The discoveries of the
astronomer and the mathematician have less imme­
diate effect on this sense than the electrification of
the suburban lines. Light and the heavenly bodies
are doing what they always did, but the wheels of
mechanical civilisation are ever accelerating. What
is the difforence between Dick Turpin and the
modern gangster highwayman? Only a mode of
transport, a tempo of gunfire, and a quickened
time sense. One rides to York on Black Bess and
shoots with a muzzle loader, and the other drives
a stolen Bentley and carries a machine pistol. As
Kipling says, transportation is civilisation. It may
be a coincidence, but spacetime came in with the
taximeter, which is by petrol engine out of clock­
work.
Joyce took carefully into account all the mechan­
ical conditions of his day, but those mechanical
conditions never influenced him in the sense that
they influenced many of his contemporaries. The
cubist, for example, is stricken with dull wonder
by the massive organisation of the machine at rest.
The futurist is excited to frenzy by the speed and
fury of the machine in motion. Both are slavishly
subservient to the wheels and pistons of the engines
that were created to be our slaves. Them the
machine has mastered, but it has never influenced
the material or outlook of Joyce in this sense.
Except by way of observing its effects on the minds
and movements ofhis characters Joyce pays mechan­
ical development no heed. Still less does he pay
heed to it in his tempo of composition.
1 32
 JAMES J OYCE

In Wandering Rocks the action goes forward at

clockspeed. The characters seem to be performing
actions with a minimum of will-power. It is as if
they were borne towards their ends floating on an
invisible tide, actively swimming neither with nor
against it. Bloom has done all he can do for the
moment in the matter of the Keyes ad. He has
copied the drawing of the crossed keys out of the
Kilkenny People, and now it is up to his chiefs on the
paper to agree to his client's terms. Stephen is at
a loose end, fatigued and deflated after his talk on
Shakespeare in the National Library. Marion, in
7 Eccles Street, is preparing for a serious rehearsal of
Love's Old Sweet Song. Blazes Boylan, not yet
"Boylan with impatience," is preparing for a
favourable reception with a purchase of ripe fruit.
Punters are putting their last minute bets on their
fancies for the Ascot Gold Cup; the horses are in
the paddock, but the race is not yet run. The time
employed can hardly be more than three quarters
of an hour.
No one person seems more important than
another. Inasmuch as the centre of the stage is
held, it is held not by an individual but by a family,
a unit of social organisation. After Dublin itself
comes the Dedalus family, father, daughters and
Stephen. Grievous poverty that engages the mind
continually in a defensive warfare against want is
the keynote of their existence. Maggy, Boody, and
Katey Dedalus are eating their gift of peasoup with
bread, while sister Dilly is looking for their father.
They are inclined to be critical of their father, but
when the youngest of the three exclaims with
thoughtless bitterness, "Our father who art not in
heaven," Maggy rebukes her with "Boody! For
shame !" Dilly meets her father outside Dillon's
auction rooms. A clever man and apt at diversions,
1 33
 J A MES JOYCE
he criticises her round shoulders and drooping
carriage, but she brushes his attack aside and
bluntly asks for money. He gives her a shilling,
but Dilly is as tenacious as she is direct, and demands
more. Two further pennies is his limit. As he walks
away with the din of the lacquey's bell ringing in
his ears, he mimics the mincing speech of the nuns
who were responsible for his daughter's education.
He meets an old friend, Bob Cowley, who is in distress
on account of a couple of bumbailiffs who are
hanging round his house trying to effect an entrance.
More poverty. One penny of the twopence her
father had _given her for a bun and a glass of milk
for herself she spends on culture. She buys a
coverless copy of Chardenal's French primer and,
prize in hand, meets and hails her brother, Stephen,
at a neighbouring bookstall. She is afraid that her
ambition to learn French may strike her brother as
ridiculous.
" 'What did you buy that for?' he asked. 'To learn
French?'
"She nodded, reddening and closing tight her
lips.
"Show no surprise. Quite natural.
" 'Here', Stephen said. 'It's all right. Mind
Maggy doesn't pawn it on you. I suppose all my
books are gone.'
" 'Some,' Dilly said. 'We had to.'
"She is drowning. Agenbite. Save her. Agenbite.
All against us. She will drown me with her, eyes
and hair. Lank coils of seaweed hair around me,
my heart, my soul. Salt green death. We.
"Agenbite of Inwit. Inwit's Agenbite.
"Misery! Misery!"
Stephen has a strong sense of family solidarity.
He will not serve the Christian God, and he will
not serve in the tribal warfare of the Irish nation,
1 34
 JAME S J O YCE
but he would serve his family if he could. The
family bond seems to be the only one of which he
recognises the validity. But who would save
drowning people must first be a good swimmer.
It seemed to me that no two episodes pleased
Joyce more in the writing of them than The Sirens and
that which followed, The Cyclops. Perhaps it was
because the war ended while The Sirens was being
written. A man may well be non-political, but he
would be lacking in humanity if he felt no relief
when the slaughter came to an end. The Sirens was
written towards the end of r g r 8.
One of the ·aspects of Ulysses that always pleases
me is its popular character. It bears a resemblance
to those old popular songs which tell of tragic
happenings to a jolly tune and a ringing chorus of
tooralooralay. The clock strikes four in the Ormond
Hotel, Blazes Boylan licks up his sloe gin and
hurries off to keep his appointment with Bloom's
wife. Bloom sees him go but decides not to interfere.
It was a momentous decision ; the situation is
tragic; yet this is the brightest and gayest episode
in the whole book. The action is told in words
that flutter past like gay-coloured butterflies. Bloom
eats his liver and bacon, drinks his cider, talks to
his fellow diner, looks at the barmaids and leaves
with a troublous murmur of wind among the reeds
of his inside.
The episode falls under the bodily sign of the ear
and the art of music. For the form and technic
Joyce borrowed the devices of the musician. The
Sirens is a fugue in counterpoint. Joyce is himself a
tenor singer and a lover of music, and was well
aware how far and in what way the musician's
manner would serve his turn. It is easy even for the
non-musical, myself for example, to see that for a
distance both arts-that of the musician and that
1 35
 J AM E S J OYCE
of the poet-can run together, singly or in double
harness. Both use sounds that follow one another
in time, and both use written symbols to conserve
and communicate them. Notes lie like words on
paper nebeneinander and like words they float in
the air-or seem to float in the air-nacheinander.
Poet and musician only part company when the
musician writes his notes iibereinander and sends
them forth on the airs in clusters and swarms.
The poet is bound to sense, and if he followed the
musician here he would leave sense behind, and
then farewell to poesie. The chord is their last point
of contact. Here no doubt but that Joyce has
followed him, not in The Sirens episode of Ulysses,
but in his Work in Progress. Joyce can give some of
the effect of four voices singing together, but not
the fact. The reader speaks the words and the
sounds fall from his lips one after the other, for all
parts must be sung with his voice, and he has only
one. The beauty of The Sirens episode lies in this:
that Joyce has mimicked all the musician's manner­
isms and rhythmical devices with so much fan­
tastical humour, at the same time carrying his own
narrative a most important step forward. It was a
field-day for the virtuoso in Joyce.
Virtuosity! Why not? The artist is a man who
can do supremely well what everybody can do to
some extent. He is more, and can do more-in his
own province. He is a specialist, in short. Every
man or woman can write a book, paint a picture,
make a tune, walk a tight rope, box a round, but
when Blondin walked the tight rope over Niagara
Falls strong men gasped for breath; when Pavlova
danced people thought the force of gravity was
vanquished; and Jim Driscoll, they say, could
make a sixteen-foot ring look as spacious as a
twenty-acre field. He has a wonderful technique,
1 36
 J AMES JOY CE

b ut he has nothing to say. He is full of inspiration,

but he has no technical ability. These are mechan­
ical antitheses. Every artist has the technical
accomplishment that belongs to the character of
his thought and vision. There may be mute in­
glorious Miltons, but the articulate Milton who
was so inspired that somehow he failed to acquire
the necessary organ tones is a myth.
A musical episode was easy to place in Dublin,
for Dublin is, or was, a musical town, with a
particular passion for vocal music. A few Dubliners
of the older generation meet in the lounge of the
Ormond Hotel and a couple of songs, with an
improvisation on the piano, constitute the enter­
tainment. No writer with any respect for proba­
bility would dare to make the same thing happen
in London. People a.t;1d pub are both lacking. The
influences that limited the expression of the Irish
people in sculpture and painting-poverty, politics,
patriotism, whatever they were-failed to hinder
expression in word and melody. In The Sirens the
Dubliners are shown to divide their interest in vocal
music between opera of the Italian school and
popular ballads. What makes them good orators
probably makes them good singers. Only a general
cult of vocal music can produce the exceptions such
as Count MacCormack and M. Sullivan. The bar
of the Ormond Hotel, where the actors of the drama
enter and through which they leave, exists as it did
in I 904, but the rest of the space-saloon in which
Simon Dedalus sang, and dining-room in which
Bloom and Richie Goulding listened and ate-has
disappeared in the rebuilding and reorganising of
the Ormond as the New Ormond HoteL
The whole of the time he was writing The Sirens
Joyce literally lived in music. There was oppor­
tunity enough and to spare in Zurich which at any
1 37
 JAMES JOYCE

time is a musical town. Its annual musical festival

is a Eur9pean event. Opera there is a permanent
institution with a home in the Stadttheater. But
just at the time when Joyce was writing The Sirens
Austrian and German currencies were falling, while
the Swiss franc was a gold franc, so that the native
musicians were reinforced by a continual inflow of
able performers from neighbouring countries, lured
by uninflated currency. Every evening there was a
concert of importance in the larger or smaller
Tonhalle. Joyce attended most of them, and to one
or two I went in his company. It was on one such
occasion when, after leaving the Tonhalle, we were
crossing the Limmat, that Joyce asked me suddenly:
"What do you think are the correspondences in
the other senses for the sense of absolute pitch in
music?"
I didn't know what he meant. When he ex­
plained I sought a parallel in the sense of sight and
art of painting.
"What about the sense of value in painting?" I
said. "Some painters have it in great measure­
Corot for example---others . . ."
"No, I don't think that's it," said Joyce. " That is
using the sense of sight creatively, to make some­
thing. The thing I mean is passive, but it is some­
thing inborn, intuitive. Kerridge has it. It enables
the person who has it to assign to any heard sound
its place in the musical scale."
"Then what about tlie wine-taster," I said, "who
picks out the vintage? Or the tea-taster, who knows
all aromas of all blends?"
"Now that's something," Joyce said. "That's
good. I have a traveller in tea in my book who is
also a tea-taster. Tom Kernan. You remember?
I shall probably use th�t."
But he didn't use it. The correspondence for the
1 38
 JAMES JOYCE

sense of absolute pitch in music in The Sirens is Molly

Bloom's comprehension of the hurdy-gurdy boy
without understanding a word of his language.
Bloom, looking at one of the barmaids, reflects on
the peculiar sympathy that exists between people of
like sexual tempo, and his thoughts go off at a
tangent to the incident of Molly and the boy.
"With look to look: songs without words. Molly
that hurdy-gurdy boy. She knew he meant the
monkey was sick. Or because so like the Spanish.
Understand animals too that way. Solomon did.
Gift of nature."
Another problem of musical association prompted
the question Joyce put to me one evening in the
Pfauen Restaurant:
"What epithets do you think most appropriate
to apply to a tenor voice?"
My own random suggestions were just such that
would occur to anybody-the brighter-toned metals
and colours, I think. Dramatically, however, the
tenor voice in The Sirens is heard through the mind
of Bloom, and appropriately the words used are
those heard by Bloom earlier in the day when
Ned Lambert read aloud the fustian speech of Dan
Dawson on Our Native Land to those present in
the Telegraph office.
"It soared, a bird, it held its flight, a swift pure
cry, soar silver orb it leaped serene, speeding,
sustained, to come, don't spin it out too long long
breath he breath long life, soaring high, high
resplendent, aflame, crowned, high in the effulgenc�
symbolistic, high, of the etherial bosom, high, of the
high vast irradiation everywhere all soaring all
around about the all, the endlessnessnessness."
Joyce's vast admiration for the tenor voice
always seemed to me to be somewhat one-sided,
and, perhaps, that is not entirely because I am
1 39
 JAMES J OYCE

no mus1c1an, for musicians find it just as difficult

to appreciate as I. But, as in the case of his original
usage of words in Work in Progress, his worship of
the tenor voice is only an exaggeration of a popular
tendency that always existed. The people have
always raved over a tenor voice. They queued up
for hours on end, myself among them, to be admitted
(at double the ordinary rates) to the comfortless
gallery at Covent Garden Opera House to hear
Caruso sing. When they heard the first aria it was
not only the excitable Italians of Saffron Hill, but
stolid Englishmen and Englishwomen too who
climbed on the seats and shouted · "bis" and "en­
core," according to how their beaks grew, at the
tops of their voices. I never saw the same enthusiasm
shown for, say, van Rooy, who on all hands was
admitted to be at least in the same rank as a singer.
And even this popular idolatry, according to an
article by Count Carducci, in Music and Letters,.
October 1 930, fell short of that madness for the
eighteen�h century "castrato" Farinelli, in whom
culminated six generations of non-virile tenors.
His "high sustained points d'orgue were of such a
purity and volume from pianissimo to fortissimo
and back again that after the first note of his air,
which was afterwards to be Philip of Spain's
lullaby for ten consecutive years, the son qual nave,
a theatre would jump to its feet and applaud
rapturously for ten minutes on end." To acquire
an archangel's voice at the expense of his sex,
especially when it brought him the worship of the
people, the favour of a king, a title and a pension
of £2,000 a year, might be considered for a man a
privileged exchange. The entirely unmusical
intelligence says of the tenor: he has something
wrong with his throat. By the same token the
pearl is something wrong with the oyster, and the
1 40
 JAMES JOYCE
b lue orchid something wrong with the tropical tree.
Yet for the pearl the Ceylon diver goes all naked to
the hungry shark, and for the orchid many hardy
men die of fever and wild beasts. But the tenor
voice is more than rare. It is high, "high in the
effulgence symbolistic" as Bloom thinks. It is a
goblet full of wine, a topmost deed of nature
working with the material, man. When Joyce talks
"tenor" one has the idea that he sees in the tenor
organ not only an instrument of musical expression
but also an adornment and a justification of
humanity.
Joyce's brilliant burlesques of the more banal
tiddleypom aspects of music pleased him, and all of
us who heard him read them, immensely. I remem­
ber two in particular. This is one of them :
"Miss Douce withdrew her satiny arm, reproach­
ful, pleased. 'Don't make half so free,' said she, 'till
we are better acquainted.' George Lidwell told
her really and truly: but she did not believe. First
gentleman told Mina that was so. She asked him
was that so. And second tankard told her so. That
thqt was so. Miss Douce, Miss Lydia, did not believe:
Miss Kennedy, Mina, did not believe: George
Lidwell, no : Miss Dou did not : the first, the first :
gent with the tank : believe, no, no : did not, Miss
Kenn : Lidlydiawell : the tank . . . "
The other occurs two pages later after Bloom has
written his letter to Martha :
"Bald Pat who is bothered mitred the napkins.
Pat is a waiter hard of his h�aring. Pat is a waiter
who waits while you wait. Hee hee hee hee. He
waits while you wait. Hee hee. A waiter is he.
Hee hee hee hee. He waits while you wait. While
you wait if you wait he will wait while you wait.
Hee hee hee hee. Hoh. Wait while you wait."
To these simple rhythms on our homeways I
141
 JAM E S JO Y C E

invented appropriate dances. The steps wouldn't

have satisfied Professor Maginni, but they were
better than I could ever do on· a dance floor to the
music of drums and saxophones.
The beginning of The Sirens overlaps The Wander­
ing Rocks. Both are treated in the same simultanist
manner, but the action in The Sirens is brisk and
voluntary, and Bloom once more dominates the
scene. While Mr. Dedalus, a few paces away, is
bringing his hat low to His Excellency, Miss Douce
and Miss Kennedy hear the viceregal" hoofs ringing
steel on the quay outside the window of their bar.
Impertinent boots brings them in their tea, which
they drink to the accompaniment of talk on skin
treatment (Miss Douce has come back from her
holidays sunburnt) and much laughter provoked
by the funny looks and mannerisms of elderly men.
Then Mr. Dedalus strolls into the empty bar and
after him Lenehan. Lenehan is still the same
tragic sponger of the story Two Gallants in
Dubliner s, but in Ulysses he is painted in gayer
colours. He is a parasite without any separate
existence of his own. His life depends upon his
being able to attach himself to some more robust
and brutal being whom he diverts with his wit
and whose spare shillings he in his turn absorbs.
Boylan is to him in Ulysses what Corley was in
Two Gallants. While waiting for Boylan he tries
to attach himself to Simon Dedalus, and is duly
cold-shouldered. The barmaids treat with disdain
his efforts to be amusing. Then enters Boylan
and orders for himself a sloe gin and a bitter for
his satellite .
Bloom was buying a twopenny packet of writing
paper and envelopes for his letter to Martha when
he saw the organiser of his wife's concert tour on an
outside car cross Essex Bridge. ". . . He eyed and
142
 JAMES JOYCE
saw afar on Essex Bridge a gay hat riding on a
jauntingcar. It is. Third time. Coincidence.
''Jingling on supple rubbers it jaunted from the
bridge to Ormond quay. Follow. Risk it. Go
quick. At four. Near now. Out."
Boylan's outside car pulls up before the Ormond
Hotel. Bloom is observing it when he meets Richie
Goulding. Together they go in to the Ormond
for a meal and, unnoticed by Blazes Boylan, reach
the dining-room. Bloom is agitated. If he wants
to interfere in his wife's love affair he must hurry.
The time of the rendezvous is four o'clock, and
just as they enter the hotel the clock strikes four.
"The bag of Goulding, Collis, Ward led Bloom
by ryebloom flowered tables. Aimless he chose
with agitated aim, bald Pat attending, a table near
the door. Be near. At four. Has he forgotten?
Perhaps a trick. Not come : whet appetite. I
couldn't do. Wait, wait. Pat, waiter, waited."
Boylan is evidently a conquering hero with
women. It is his presence rather than Lenehan's
pleadiµgs that persuades Miss Douce to perform the
trick called by Lenehan "Sonnez la cloche." The
trick consists in pinching her garter through her
skirt and letting the taut elastic smack back on her
thigh. Boylan appreciates it. He is well up in
campanology. But this is a mere tinkle compared
with the carillon that awaits him in Eccles Street.
He empties his glass at a gulp and h11:rries off, with
Lenehan expostulating in his wake. Bloom hears
him go.
"Bloom heard a jing, a little sound. He's off.
Light sob of breath Bloom sighed on the silent
blue-hued flowers. Jingling. He's gone. Jingle.
Hear."
Bob Cowley and Ben Dollard enter, flushed with
their success in gaining for Cowley a respite from
1 43
 JAMES JOYCE
distraint. They heard friend Simon Dedalus at the
piano and hail him as he comes through the saloon
door. They will have a song to celebrate Cowley's
temporary escape, and Simon shall sing it. Bloom,
in the dining-room, is at the end of his liver and
bacon when he hears Simon begin. Music lover
Richie Goulding, disdained by his proud brother­
in-law but visited b y his nephew Stephen, first
recognises "that glorious voice." They never speak
when they pass each other by. Simon sneers at his
in-law and at his in-law's family, but Richie
Goulding is a loyal admirer of "Si Dedalus's voice."
The description of Simon Dedalus's singing of the
romance from Martha, as heard by Bloom and
fused with his own experience, illuminated with
his own comment, is among the most brilliant
passages in Ulysses. It begins:
"Braintipped, cheek touched with flame, they
listened feeling that flow endearing flow over skin
limbs human heart soul spine. Bloom signed to
Pat, bald Pat is a waiter hard of hearing, to set ajar
the door of the bar. The door of the bar. So. That
will do. Pat, waiter, waited, waiting to hear, for
he was hard of hear by the door.
" 'Sorrow from me seemed to depart.'
"Through the hush of air a voice sang to them,
low, not rain, not leaves in murmur, like no voice
of strings of reeds or whatdoyoucallthem dulcimers,
touching their still ears with words, still hearts of
their each his remembered lives. Good, good to
hear: sorrow from them each seemed to from both
depart when first they heard. When first they saw,
lost Richie, Poldy, mercy of beauty, heard from a
person wouldn't expect it in the least, her first
merciful lovesoft oftloved word.
"Love that is singing: love's old sweet song.
1 44
 JAM E S JO Y C E
Bloom unwound slowly the elastic b and of his
packet. Love's old sweet sonnez la gold. Bloom
wound a skein round four fork-fingers, stretched it,
relaxed, and wound it round his troubled double,
fourfold, in octave, gyved them fast. . . ."
Th� surplus of his listening sensib ility brings in
thoughts of his wife and Blazes Boylan. "Last look
at mirror always before she answers the door,"
and of the singer and his life. "Glorious tone he
has still. . . . Wore out his wife: now sings. But
hard to tell. Only the two themselves." Then of the
coincidence that just to-day they should be singing
Martha.
"Martha. How strange ! To-day." 'With
"Charmed my Eye" come recollections of the first
time he met Marion at Mat Dillon's in Terenure,
and the whole ends in his trib ute to the tenor voice
already quoted. Music moves Bloom, but does not
carry him away. He arms his nerves against its
seductions in the same way that he protects his
intelligence against the mass suggestions of religion.
His ear "Gives instant warning of each sound's
repair, which soon is thence conveyed into the
judgment chair." He despises the over-enthusiastic
music fanatic of which Richie Goulding is a type,
yet when Simon Dedalus has finished his song and
the clamour of applause has died down, his own
thought is the truest comment. To himself he says,
"That nian's voice was a lamentation." The ear is
also an organ of b alance.
Of all the second plane figures in Ulysses none is
more delicately drawn than Simon Dedalus. He
has had good positions in his day, and has owned
property, b ut .now he has fallen on evil days and his
prospects of acquiring position or property must b e
decidedly thin. But it is an admirable trait, in a
1 45
 J AMES J O Y CE
society which puts a premium on domestic sacrifice,
that a man shall not allow his personal expansive­
ness to be swallowed up in misfortune. In his
position many would have gone about whining and
complaining and uselessly mortifying themselves.
The death of his wife was a grievous blow, as we
gather from his tears in Glasnevin cemetery and
from his thoughts as he gazes into the e>pen piano,
but his elastic spirit, courage, and feeling for style
of the Victorian gentleman keep him upright and
cheerful in misfortune. One thinks of him as a
martial type. He was antipamellite until the hue­
and-cry set in against the nationalist chief and then
he turned and rallied to his support.
Bloom calls for pen, ink and pad and begins a
letter to Martha. Thoughts of Eccles Street agitate
him. The music has distracted him and he appears
to be passably bored with his epistolary flirtation,
but the logic which says "you have begun and you
must go on," forces him to write. Richie Goulding
is a sharp-eyed man and might guess what he is
writing, so, to put his inquisitive table companion
off the scent, he pretends to be answering an ad.
for a town traveller in his Freeman's.
"Folly am I writing? Husbands don't. That's
marriage does, their wives. Becaase I'm away
from. Suppose. But how? She must. Keep young.
If she found out. Card in my high grade ha. No,
not tell all. Useless pain. If they don't see. Woman.
Sauce for the gander."
He listens with one ear to Bob Cowley's im­
provisation and keeps one watchful eye on Richie
Goulding. The letter is a thin and scrappy affair,
and Bloom is conscious of this, so he fattens it out
with two postscripts and a present, a postal order
1 46
 JAMES JOYCE

for 2s. 6d. Then he gets up to go while Cowley's

tune wanders into the minuet from Don Giovanni,
and Boylan knocks on the door of 7 Eccles Street.
Bloom pays and is about to go when he hears
Ben Dollard's "bass barreltone" begin to sing
The Croppy Boy, by special request. Ben Dollard
comes to "Last of my name and race." Bloom
thinks :
"I too, last my race. Milly young student. Well,
my fault perhaps. No son. Rudy. Too late now.
Or if not? If not? If still?
"He bore no hate.
"Hate. Love. Those are names. Rudy. Soon
I am old."
He enfilades the bar with his eye, and sees the
barmaids and all the customers listening, sees also
"popped corks, splashes of beerfroth, stacks of
empties," and, no friend of sad endings, leaves
before the sad end of the song.
"By rose, by satiny bosom, by the fondling hand,
by slops, by empties, by popped corks, greeting in
going, past eyes and maidenhair, bronze and faint
gold in deep sea shadow, went Bloom, soft Bloom,
l feel so lonely Bloom."
Pleasure in the glittering material of The Sirens
might distract us from the serious action going on
if we failed to hear the undertones of the music.
Ulysses is never solemn, is often fantastically comic,
is amoral and philosophically humane, but it is
always serious. Joyce no more analyses his charac­
ters than he describes their surroundings, but we
are to suppose that he intended them to be compre­
hended just as he wished the nature of the city of
Dublin to be felt. Half of Bloom's day is over.
Thrice he has seen Boylan-here in the Ormond
1 47
 JAMES JOYCE
for the last time-and Marion's appointment is at
four. He sees Blazes Boylan leave, and knows quite
well that the singing of Love's Old Sweet Song is
less than half the business on the agenda. All his·
reflections go to show that prospect causes him
a degree of suffering. Why, then, does he not
interfere? It would be possible even now, without
causing any violent disturbance, to return to his
home in Eccles Street with an I-have-forgotten­
something-most-imp9rtant sort of air. On three
occasions during the day he has thought of going
home with a view to stopping the affair. In the
Telegraph office he says to himself, "I could go
home still: tram: something I forgot."
And again in Grafton 5treet: "Useless to go
back. Had to be. Tell me all." While in Daly's,
seeing the outside car come over Essex Bridge,
he thinks, "Follow. Risk it. Go quick. · At four.
Near now. Out." But he chose to let the matter
take its course. Why? This is my own solution:
Bloom is a Jew, an Oriental, and the Oriental
races are fatalistic in outlook. What has to be will be.
What is written will come to pass. You may prevent
a thing to-day, but what about to-morrow? He
feels that it is as useless to fight against destiny in
the shape of his wife's desires as it is to try to turn
rivers from their courses or dam back the tides.
But fatalism is not all. Fatalism is often the fighter's,
the soldier's philosophy, but the soldier fights none
the worse for knowing that on the appointed day
the tide of battle will turn against him.
But Bloom makes no effort, no fight at all.
Why? Because if he fought he would b e denied his
suffering. His Jewish masochism is deprived of its
traditional outlet in religious observances. For
him are no b lack fasts, no lamentations for the fall
of Jerusalem none of the griefs and penances of
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 J AMES JOY CE
Israel, because h e has left the faith of his fathers.
But the racial pessimism, the will to suffer are
there, and the only instrument through which he
can suffer is his wife. The griefs and exaltations
of the cuckolded husband are a substitute for the
griefs and exaltations of Israel from which he is
exiled. Therefore, negative as it may seem, there
was will power behind Bloom's masterly inactivity
on that bright June day.
Linked to the fatalism of the Oriental and organic­
ally connected with his Jewish and personal maso­
chism is the homosexual wish to share his wife
with other men. He is surrounded with acquain­
tances, yet he is a lonely man, condemned never to
experience the warmth of male fellowship-in­
capable, perhaps, of accepting it were it offered
him. That his wife is possessed by other males
gives him a physical contact with them at second
hand. It is an underground substitute for noisy
back-slapping, arm-gripping comradeship. In The
Circe episode he offers his wife in thought to "all
strong-membered males." And why does he carry
around with him constantly the photograph of his
wife? It is not for his own private gaze. He knows
quite well what she looks like. He carries it around
so that he may show it on any convenient occasion
to any favoured man as, later in the day, he shows
it to Stephen. Her image is for him a bond of union
with menfolk, as with the average man is the
cigarette case and "What'll you have to drink?"
And Marion acquires new value for him through
the fact that her flesh is desirable to other men.
All amateurs love to share and show, and Bloom,
the slavishly uxorious husband, amateur of his wife,
desires to show and share her. He wishes,perhaps,
to be first but not alone.
Then, as we have seen, Bloom is a non-authori-
1 49
 JAMES JOYCE

tarian husband and father. His rule of conduct

forbids him to say no to that which his wife desires.
He is a fair-minded man who, claiming liberty for
himself, cannot deny it to others. That is to say,
the best of him does not and the rest of him dares
not. Apart from all fair-mindedness, what his
better half desires is for him also the wishful thing.
Just as he prepares her breakfast, fetches her lotion,
buys her erotic literature, so he claims indulgence
from himself for her Spanish blood.
Lastly he desires a son, as all males, and par­
ticularly Jewish males, desire a son to bear their
name and perpetuate their individuality. Marion
is the only possible giver of that blessing. He is not
old as men go-he is only thirty-eight-but the
question of age is a sore point with him. "Made me
feel young" : "Keep young" : "I am getting old" :
such thoughts are ever in his mind. If he should
carry his flirtation with Martha that far, the son
born would not be his and would not bear his
name. He would live in a different place, be
brought up under other influences, and for Bloom
a son is not merely a confirmation of his virility.
He wants to foster, protect, educate. Something
happened to the relationship between him and
Marion at the time of Rudy's death. The old
intimacy waned and died, but he vaguely hopes
that it may be re-established, and they, are both
of an age when a son may yet be born to them.
If he complained about or fought against her other
loves the breach might be widened, a complete
separation might follow, and his hopes of offspring
be for ever frustrated. And what are a few men
more or less compared with the possible realisation
of his family hopes and ambitions?
 CHAPTER EIGHT
THE one-eyed man may be king in the realm of the
blind, but the two-eyed man is nothing but a
nuisance in the kingdom of the one-eyed. The blind
man is thankful for the seeing eye and guiding
hand of another, but the one-eyed man needs no
such assistance. He sees quite well, and has no
thanks to spare for the man who tells him that the
shape he thinks is as flat as cardboard is in reality
round, or that there are such things as half-tones,
values and nuances of colour. To him all shapes
are flat, all darks black, all lights blinding white.
They are perverted enemies of the truth who affirm
the contrary.
The Sirens episode is swift-moving, bright-coloured,
and for its effect depends on nuances of colour. The
persons in it are drawn to a natural scale, whereas
The Cyclops episode is built up of vast masses of
contrasting colour, light and dark; the persons
are over life-size and are drawn in the exaggerated
outlines of grotesque comedy. The one provokes
the ripple and the other the roar of laughter.
Two-eyed Bloom ventures into the cavern of one­
eyed nationalism. On the matter of the Dignam
insurance he calls at Barney Kiernan's to look for
Martin Cunningham, and finds there a few Irish
patriots discussing the woes and virtues of their
native land. He reasons with them but they think
his humanity out of place, his moderation untimely.
Besides, he is a Jew and has no country, so how
should he know anything about it? Bloom generally
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 J AMES JOYCE
avoids frontal attacks on obstacles, preferring to go
round them like a river. He is not at all quarrel­
some by nature, but here he is provoked into dis­
playing vehemence in argument, even to the
length of risking personal injury. Big Boy Poly­
phemus in the person of a giant Fenian assails him
with rocks. Long-suffering Bloom addresses to his
adversary winged words.
The unspoken thoughts of Bloom are often
political. He has ideas, for example, as to how the
city's tram service might be improved, and he is
in favour of endowment at birth and other desirable
reforms. But here he takes part actively in political
debate. He is a rational humanitarian and believes
in non-violent methods of realising his aims.
Patience and reason are to him more effective
weapons than bombs and machine-guns. It is a
standpoint more Asiatic than European. It found
expression in the beginnings of Christianity, and it
persists in . the Christianity of Tolstoy's followers.
Gandhi holds to it, and the Quaker sect practises it.
The theory is that if you resist what you regard as
injustice and oppression with violence you will be
forced to create the same apparatus of violence
as the unjust oppressor; and the end will be, not
that the oppressed man becomes a free man, but
that he, in his turn, becomes an oppressor by virtue
of his possessing the necessary instruments and the
accompanying state of mind.
Stephen's attitude towards politics is a clear and
consistent negative. As an artist he must keep his
mind and body free for his artist's purposes. He
has one life, so many days and hours, and has
neither time nor energy to spare for the tyranny of
parties and their policies. Generally speaking, la
patrie asks only for our bodies in war time and for
our money �11 the time, but Ireland demands of her
1 52
 JAMES JOYCE
sons a continual service of soul as well. This
service he will not give. And there is something
more in Stephen's attitude than the egoism of the
artist. He was nine years old at the time of Parnell's
downfall, and that event stamped itself ineffaceably
on his growing consciousness. Sensitive and scep­
tical as he was, he would not be likely to forget it.
Why should loyalty to any new party be less brittle
than loyalty to the great . parliamentary chief?
Stephen says to Davin in A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man: "No honourable and sincere man has
given up to you his life and his youth and his
affections from the days of Tone to those of Parnell
but you sold him to the enemy or failed him in need
or reviled him and left him for another. And you
invite me to be one of you. I'd see you damned
first."
When the partisan asks Stephen, "Under which
flag?" Stephen replies, "Neither." So does Bloom.
But Bloom hoists a flag of his own, whereas Stephen
refuses to serve or govern under any flag. Bloom
does not deny his responsibility for the just govern­
ment of the city. He is political and belongs to a
party, but there is only one in . it-himself. He
throws the whole weight qf his party into the scale
on the side of reason and justice, but it weighs only
eleven stone four. Stephen is anarchist, Bloom is
utopian. Utopia and Anarchy are old neighbours
and near of kin, but they have never got on well
together.
Sinn Fein existed in 1904, but at that time had
no Labour ally to mix the slogans of Marx with those
of Kossuth and Garibaldi. In the main Ireland is a
country of peasants and small producers but the
wage-worker, even in such a country, is too valu­
able an ally and too redoubtable an adversary to
reject or antagonise. Connolly, the man who was
1 53
 J A M E S J OYCE
to unite the forces of proletarian wage workers with
those of peasants and small producers in the service
of the nationalist cause, was still in America. The
Harp was not yet founded. The Citizen Army was
not yet in being. There was as yet no distinctively
Labour ally fighting under its own banner in
the nationalist camp.
Joyce is more a Dubliner than an Irishman. His
form of patriotism is that of a citizen of a free town
in the middle ages. He has told me that he would
rather be burgomaster of a city like Amsterdam
than emperor of any empire; for a burgomaster is
somebody among people he knows, while an
emperor rules over unknowable people in unknown
territories. His interest in Ireland is intense, from
Howth Head to the far side of Phrenix Park, and
from Glasnevin to Rathmines (conterminous, there­
fore, with the old Scandinavian kingdom of
Dyffiinarsky), but begins to fade before it reaches
Leitrim, and hardly exists at all at the Atlantic
seaboard. In Work in frogress Ireland figures
only as the estate of the Lord of Dublin and is
populated with his quarrelsome and troublesome
tenants.
Early in 1919, when the deeds of militant Sinn
Fein were becoming world news, I was sitting with
Joyce one evening in my workroom in the Usteri­
strasse . It was a quiet room overlooking the Sihl,
and it had for furniture two quite comfortable
chairs, a table, and a copious litter of newspaper
files, English, Swiss and German. Thither we often
went at that time to continue a conversation
interrupted by Po lizeistunde in the Wirtschaft, and
to be stayed with a further flagon. We spoke of the
happenings in Ireland. Joyce stated no positive,
personal opinion on the solution to the conflict,
but I put my own in this way:
1 54
 JAMES JOYCE
"All this fighting with Ireland is absorbing too
much English energy. History is leading us up the
garden. We are being ruined by politics. Let us
give economics a chance. The Irish want politicai
autonomy. Why not give them what they want,
give them at any rate what will satisfy them? Then,
perhaps, when history is satisfied, the two islands
will be able to realise their unity on an economic
basis".
"Ireland is what she is," said Joyce, "and there­
fore I am what I am because of the relations that
have existed between England and Ireland. Tell
me why you think I ought to wish to change the
conditions that gave Ireland and me a shape and a
destiny?"
"But what about us?" I said with indignation.
" Do you think that we English exist to further the
spiritual development of the Irish people?"
Joyce's eyes flickered laughter behind their
powerful lenses. He made no answer, and I took
his silence to mean that he did think that that was
one of our useful functions. Meeting Joyce a day or
two later, he referred to our conversation in my
room and laughed again, this time loudly.
"That talk of ours the other evening amuses me,"
he said. "You, an Englishman, trying to convince
me, an Irishman, of the necess�ty of home rule for
Ireland on the premises of the British Consulate,
representing more or less the British Empire in
Zurich."
We were strolling along the Bahnhofstrasse one
evening after he had read to me a passage where
the Fenian giant, representative of the most one­
eyed nationalism, denounces the bloody and brutal
Sassenach.
"I wonder," said Joyce suddenly, "what my own
countrymen will think of my work?"
1 55
 J AM E S JOYCE

�'I think they won't like it," I said. "The ardent

party man is apt to believe that he who is not with
him is against him. He understands opposition,
but doesn't like criticism. Your countrymen are
men of violent beliefs, and your book is the book of
a sceptic."
"I know it is," said Joyce. "It is the work of a
sceptic, but I don't want it to appear the work .of
a cynic. I don't want to hurt or offend those of my
countrymen who are devoting their lives to a
cause they feel to be necessary and just."
Sceptic, however, is a misleading term for a purely
contemplative artist. Such an artist sees the world
as standing still, not as advancing or retreating.
Joyce may be musical in taste rather than pictorial,
yet his view of life is that of a painter surveying a
still scene rather than that of a musician following
a development through time.
Compared with the two preceding episodes,
Tiu Cyclops episode is simple to follow. It is a
straightforward tale told by one whose name is
never mentioned, Noman. This unnamed one meets
Joe Hynes, and together they adjourn to Barney
Kiernan's in Little Britain Street, where they meet
several others, and where a discussion takes place
on what, to Englishmen, is known as the Irish
question. But the easy colloquial flow of the
narrative is interrupted at intervals with barriers of
prose of a fabulous, legendary, or merely official
and important order. This is the other side of the
question. It is the subject of discussion seen sud­
denly through a telescope.
"Does this episode strike you as being futuristic?"
said Joyce.
"Rather cubist than futurist," I said. "Every
event is a many-sided object. You first state one
view of it and then you draw it from another angle
1 56
 JAMES J O Y· C E

to another scale, and both aspects lie side by side in

the same picture.
Mention of an uncollectable debt, for example,
calls forth a copy of a hire purchase agreement
between Moses Hertzog, "hereinafter called the
vendor," and Michael Geraghty, "hereinafter
called the purchaser." A case of mistaken identity
(Alf Bergan thinks he saw the dead and buried
Paddy Dignam walking down the street with
Willy Murray) is rewritten in the complacent
familiar-with-ghosts style of a spiritist seance report.
The Myler Keogh v. Percy Bennett fight is referred
to and retold in the ding-dong style of the boxing
reporter. TheCitizen swabs his mouth after spitting,
and his handkerchief is described as if it were a
rare specimen of early Irish illumination. The fall
of the biscuit tin, thrown by the citizen at Bloom,
is magnified to earthquak.e dimension. Bloom is
driven away ·in Martin Cunningham's car, and the
event is described as an ascent into heaven. And
so on.
Through the narrative and commentary of the
Nameless One, "I," a wonderful back view of
Dublin and Dubliners is obtained. He knows no
good of anybody, and the bad that he knows has
been collected by way of keyholes, torn curtains,
thin partitions , waste-paper baskets and scraps of
gossip. To him all heroes are blockheads, all
saints are rogues, and he looks at the gods only to
see if their clay feet are cracking up nicely. He
communes at times with a kindred soul, Pisser
(Andrew) Burke. Should some habitually honest
Dubliner perform for once a shady action, or a
temporarily embarrassed gentleman slip furtively
into a pawnshop , or a good husband one night stop
to talk to a whore, or a brave man dodge into a
doorway out of danger, and should the Nameless
1 57
 J A M E S, J O Y C E

One himself not be present to witness their shame

and discomfiture, then the ubiquitous Pisser Burke
will be on duty at the worst angle, and "I" will
add the piece to his scurvy repertoire at their next
meeting. The observant Andrew does not appear
in the fl�sh, but he is sufficiently represented in the
narrative and commentary of his unnamed friend.
So vividly presented is the grotesque life of "I"
that we are forced to like him in spite of his poison­
ousness. Himself a snarling Thersites, he liberates
the Thersites in us. The detective story and the
music-hall platesmasher do the same thing for our
sleuths, mass murderers and crockery destroyers .
Bloom, I take it, can be so rationally humane
because the presence of "I" relieves him of all
hatred, malice and uncharitableness. "I" is an
aspect of Bloom's mind, for the moment given
separate form and life. Like Bloom, the Nameless
One can see two sides of a question, only for him
both sides are equally rotten. He is two-eyed, but
both eyes are evil eyes. In the rich collection of
"characters" in English literature "I" is sure of his
place on the line; and so is the Citizen, who shares
with Bloom and the Nameless One the honours of
the sitting.
The Citizen is an over lifesize Fenian nationalist.
His vituperative eloquence reaches the colossal.
For him the world is a simple and vivid place. To.ere
is one supremely good thing in it, Ireland, and one
thing too vile for words (though he does his best)­
England. The rest of it has for him onlv a vague
existence. The French, a set of dancing masters,
"never worth a roasted fart to Ireland," and the
Germans, "sausageeating bastards," are brushed
aside in a couple of phrases; as for the English,
they have no redeeming feature. Their religion is
hypocrisy; their form of government is slavery;
158
 J A MES J OYCE
their art, music and literature were stolen from the
Irish. In this connection he addresses to them the
following benison : " 'Their syphilisation, you
mean,' says the Citizen. 'To hell with them ! The
curse of a goodfornothing God light sideways on the
bloody thicklugged sons of whores' gets ! No music
and no art ana no literature worthy of the name.
Any civilisation they have . they stole from us.
Tonguetied sons of bastards' ghosts.' ",Their deeds
in Ireland are one long record of incessant crime.
Patriots like Joe Hynes and John Wyse Nolan seem
watery and weak by the side of this ferocious
Fenian, although one surmises that Hynes and
Nolan may have been "out" in the Easter rising,
whereas the Citizen would certainly have been
absent. For he is represented as something of a
public-house windbag with a prodigious gift of the
gab, hanging round and waiting for a patient
listener who will put up the pints. How he gets his
living we are not told, but "I," as usual, knows
something to his discredit. He bought the holding
of an evicted tenant, and the Molly Maguires are
going to let daylight through him for this betrayal
of the cause. Bloom knows that he hawked round
a particularly ugly sister with a view, probably, to
finding a _good Fenian brother-in-law who might
help to quench his thirst. By way of local colour he
is always accompanied by a great wolfhound ; but
it doesn't belong to him. He borrows it from Mr.
Giltrap.
The Nameless One is a collector of bad and
doubtful debts and, while trying to get information
about Michael Geraghty, who owes money to
Moses Hertzog, he meets Joe Hynes. At Hynes's
invitation he accompanies him to Barney Kiernan's
saloon. This pub is still going strong in Little
Britain Street, but its great days were from fifty
1 59
 J A MES JOYCE

to a hundred years ago. Yet still it stands as it was

then, non-party market scales hanging from smoked
rafters, cobwebs and all complete. Time was when
Dan O'Connell and his contemporaries dropped in
from the courthouse for a drink, and later on the
Earl of Dudley, the popular Viceroy, was an
occasional guest, but now, so t�e genial proprietor
assures me, the art of and the taste for conversation
(an art developed in the tavern through centuries to
perfection) have been vanquished by the cinema, the
football field and puritan licensing laws. Besides, the
greater part of the business of the courthouse, whose
frequenters formed the major part of its clientele,
has been transferred to more commodious and
accessible premises. Joe tells the Nameless One
that he wants to give the hard word to the Citizen
about a meeting of the cattle traders' association
that had taken place the previous night at the City
Arms and, sure enough, on arriving at Barney
Kiernan's, they see the Citizen with Giltrap's
wolfhound, Garryowen, and his pocket full of
papers, working for the cause. Bob Doran is
huddled in a corner, drunk. Alf Bergan comes in,
laughing at Denis Breen whom he has just seen, still
on the warpath after the sender of the postcard,
U.P. : up, but his laughter wakes Bob Doran. It is a
few minutes later that Bloom enters the house. He
has for some time been walking to and fro from the
door of the pub to the corner of Little Green Street,
trying to catch Martin Cunningham. On the third
sight of him, walking up and down, the Citizen
hails him and tells him to come in. The others are
so interested in a few letters from prospective
hangmen, brought in for their delectation by Alf
Bergan, that Bloom's entry passes unnoticed.
Bloom's mood has changed. Taciturn and
reserved as he was in the Ormond Hotel, in Barney
1 6o
 JAMES JOYCE

Kiernc:1n's he is nervous and talkative. No matter

what the subject of conversation may be he can
always amplify it with an instructive lecture. He
refuses a drink from his colleague, Joe Hynes, but
accepts a cigar, and at once joins in the talk on the
effect of hanging on the male sexual organ. There
is no interior monologue to inform us of Bloom's
thought p1 ocesses. The Bloom of The Cyclops episode
is the Bloom seen and heard by the nameless
narrator.
" 'That can be explained by science,' says
Bloom. 'It's only a natural phenomenon, don't you
you see, because on account of the . . /
"And then he starts with his jaw-breakers
about phenomenon and science and this pheno­
menon and the other phenomenon . . . ."
The Citizen, Joe and Bloom go on from this one
aspect of capital punishment to the champions of
Ireland who suffered death for the cause (most of
them, the brothers Shears, Emmet, Tone, sentenced
in the neighbouring sessions-house by Lord Norbury)
and "I" proceeds, aided by the observation and
memory of his friend, Pisser Burke :
"And Bloom, of course, with his knockmedown
cigar putting on swank with his lardy face. Pheno­
menon ! The fat heap he married is a nice old
phenomenon with a back on her like a ball-alley.
Time they were stopping up in the Ci!J Arms Pisser
Burke told me there was an old one there with a
cracked loodheramaun of a nephew and Bloom
trying to get the soft side of her doing the molly­
coddle playing bezique to come in for a bit of the
wampum in her will and not eating meat of a
Friday because the old one was always thumping
her craw and taking the lout out for a walk. And
one time he led him the rounds of Dublin and, by
the holy farmer, he never cried crack till he brought
161
 JAMES JOYCE

him home as drunk as a boiled owl . . . Jesus, I

had to laugh at Pisser Burke taking them off
chewing the fat and Bloom with his but don't you
see? and but on the other hand. . . . "
Bloom's nerves betray him into a significant
lapse of speech. Joe Hynes is standing another
round of drinks and Bloom again declines. He must
see Martin Cunningham. Dignam's insurance
policy is mortgaged, but as he neglected to serve a
notice of assignment on the company the mortgagee
can't recover.
" 'Holy wars,' says Joe laughing, 'that's a good
one if old Shylock is landed. So the wife comes out
top dog, what?'
" 'Well, that's a point,' says Bloom, 'for the wife's
admirers.'
" 'Whose admirers?' says Joe.
" 'The wife's advisers, I mean,' says Bloom.
"Then he starts all confused mucking it up about
the mortgagor under the act. . . . He was bloody
safe he wasn't run in himself under the act that
time as a rogue and vagabond only he had a friend
in court. Selling bazaar tickets, or what do you
call it Royal Hungarian privileged lottery. . . ."
Mention of the meeting of the cattle traders'
association brings up the subject of the foot and
mouth disease, and here again Bloom has plenty
to say. "Because he wa� up one time in a knacker's
yard. Walking about with his book and penci}
here's my head and my heels are coming till Joe
Cuffe gave him the order of the boot for giving lip
to a grazier. Mister Knowall. Teach your grand­
mother how to milk ducks. . . . "
The conversation veering to the subject of Irish
national sports and pastimes finds Bloom equally
well informed.
" And of course Bloom had to have his say
1 62
 JAMES JOYCE

too about if a fellow had a rower's heart violent

exercise was bad. I declare to my antimacassar if
you took up a, straw from the bloody floor and if you
said to Bloom : Look at, Bloom. Do you see that straw ?
That's a straw. Declare to my aunt h�'d talk ,, about
it for an hour so he would and talk steady.
From sport in general to the Keogh-Bennett fight ·
is but a step. Bloom tries hard to turn their attention
to lawn tennis and the circulation of the blood, but
in· vain. First comes the fight, and after the fight
the projected concert tour, just what Bloom ex­
pected, and just what he wanted to avoid.
" 'Mrs. B. is the bright particular star, isn't she ?'
says Joe.
" ' My wife ?' says Bloom. 'She's singing, yes. I
think it will be a success too. He's an excellent
man to organise. Excellent.'
" 'Hoho begob,' says I to myself, says I. 'That
explains the milk in the cocoanut and absence of
hair on the animal's chest. . . . That's the bucko
that'll organise her, take my tip. 'Twixt me and
you Caddereesh.' "
J. J. O'Molloy and Ned Lambert come m and
after them John Wyse Nolan and Lenehan, the
latter with a long face on account of the failure of
his tip to win the Gold Cup. Looking around for
something for nothing as · usual he spies an open
biscuit tin, but finds it empty. The Citizen tries to
quarrel with Bloom; but his only success is to pro­
voke that moderate man to the rejoinder: "Some
people can see the mote in others' eyes but they
can't see the beam in their own." The Citizen
replies with another saw: "There's no-one as blind
as the fellow that won't see." And with a great
flow of patriotic eloquence predicts a day when the
products of Irish industry shall be sought after the
world over, and when, to protect her merchandise
1 63
 JAMES JOYCE

and her shores, Ireland shall have her own battle­

ships upon the seas.
"And will again, says he, when the first Irish
battleship is seen breasting the waves with our own
flag to the fore, none ofyour Henry Tudor's harps,
no, the oldest flag afloat, the flag ofthe province of
Desmond and Thomond, three crowns on a blue
field, the three sons ofMilesius."
They all condemn the cruel discipline and
degrading flogging in the British navy, till the
irrepressible Bloom interrupts:
" 'But,' says Bloom, 'isn't discipline the same
everywhere? I mean wouldn't it be the same here
ifyou put force against force?' "
A moment later the citizen asks Bloom bluntly
what his nation is.
" 'Ireland,' says Bloom. 'I was born here,
Ireland. . . . And I belong to a race too,' says
Bloom, 'that is hated and persecuted. Also now.
This very moment. This very instant . . . But it's
no use,' says he. 'Force, hatred, history, all that.
That's not life for men and women, insult and
hatred. And everybody knows that it's the very
opposite of that that is really life.'
" 'What?' says Alf.
" 'Love,' says Bloom. 'I mean the opposite of
hatred. I must go now,' says he to John Wyse.
'Just round to the court a moment to see if Martin
is there. If he comes just say I'll be back in a
second. Just a moment.' "
While Bloom is away Lenehan suggests as a
reason for his hasty departure that he has a few
bob on the Gold Cup winner Throwaway, and has
gone round to collect his winnings from the book­
maker.
" 'That's where he's gone,' says Lenehan. 'I
met Bantam Lyons going to back that horse only
1 64
 JAMES JOYCE
I put him off it and he told me Bloom gave him the
tip. Bet you what you like he has a hundred shillings
to five on. He's the only man in Dublin has it. A
dark horse.' "
"I" goes out into the yard to pumpship, and on
his return hears John Wyse Nolan telling the others
that it was Bloom who revealed to Arthur Griffith
the forms of organisation and methods of action of
certain Hungarian patriots and that Griffith had
adapted these to the use of Sinn Fein. Martin
Cunningham, entering with two friends, is appealed
to and confirms the statement. "I" comments on
it : " . . . Gob, that puts the bloody kybosh on it
if old sloppyeyes is mucking up the show. Give us
a bloody chance. God save Ireland from the likes
of that bloody mouseabout. " Further commentary
on Bloom, his character and his family, is in progress
when that innocent man reappears in a great hurry.
This is too much for the Citizen. Bloom has been
the reasonable man among partisans, a Jew among
Gentiles and now, to crown it all, he is, as they
mistakenly think, the lucky punter who basely
avoids standing a round of drinks for the less
fortunate brethren.
" 'Don't tell anyone,' says the Citizen, letting
a bawl out of him. 'It's a secret.' "
Martin Cunningham sees trouble brewing, and
hustles Bloom out of the pub into the waiting car.
The Citizen shouts : "Three cheers for Israel! " and
the excited Bloom stands up in the car talking and
gesticulating.
" And says he:
" 'Mendelssohn was a Jew and Karl Marx and
Mercadante and Spinoza. And the Saviour was a
Jew and his Father was a Jew. Your God.'
" 'He had no Father,' says Martin. 'That'll do
now. Drive ahead.'
 JAMES JOYCE
" 'Whose God !' says the Citizen.
" 'Well, his uncle was a Jew,' says he. 'Your God
was a Jew. Christ was a Jew like me.'
"Gob, the Citizen made a plunge back into the
shop.
" 'By Jesus,' says he, 'I'll brain that bloody
Jewman for using the Holy name. By Jesus, I'll
crucify him, so I will. Give us that biscuit box
here.' "
He dives back into the pub, grabs the empty
biscuit tin, sniffed at by Garryowen, approached
in vain by the hungry Lenehan, rushes out into
Little Britain Street, and hurls the missile at Bloom.
But the .car was already on the way and rounding
the corner into Little Green Street, and the sun got
in the Citizen's eye so that he missed, and the tin
clattered harmlessly on the pavement.
"And the last we saw was the bloody car rounding
the corner and old sheepsface on it gesticulating
and · the bloody mongrel after it with his lugs back
for all he was bloody well worth to tear him limb
from limb. Hundred to five! Jesus, he took the
value of it out of him, I promise you.
"When, lo, there came about them all a great
brightness and they beheld the chariot wherein
He stood ascend to heaven. And they beheld Him in
the chariot, clothed upon in the glory of the
brightness, having raiment as of the sun, fair as
the moon and terrible that for awe they durst not
look upon Him. And there came a voice out of
heaven, calling: Elijah! Elijah! And he answered
with a main cry: Abba! Adonai! And they beheld
Him even Him, hen Bloom Elijah, amid clouds of
angels ascend to the glory of the brightness at an
angle of fortyfive degrees over Donohoe's in Little
Green Street like a shot off a shovel."
This is thr. only episode, Penelope excepted, in
166
 JAM E S JOYC E
which Bloom is seen entirely through other eyes.
There is no comment ofhis own on himselfor others.
First he appears performing furtively.. a good deed,
looking after the Dignam insurance for the grief­
stricken widow and orphans. Then he is guest in
the strangers' house. A child of light, he is enter­
tained by the children of this world. He begins at
the beginning by bringing the light of intelligence
to bear on such simple questions as physical exer­
cise, diseases ofcattle and so on, but soon enters the
dangerous ground of the conduct of life and the
relation of living man to his past. Messengers from
Mars and such-like people, who, having swallowed
history, talk as if there were no past, are asking for
the glory of martyrdom. The religious reformer is
all very well while he sticks to form, but let him not
go to the root of the matter and tell people how to
think and live. Bloom, who has no son in whom to
place his messianic hopes, must be son and messiah
to himself. He ask$ for martyrdom and gets it. He
appreciates it.
There is only one explanation of Bloom's change
of mood and that is that the spirit bloweth whither
it listeth; yet his argumentative nervousness is
evidently due to happenings in 7 Eccles Street. He
shows this in his blunders in speech: " admirers"
for "advisers," and in his desperate efforts to avoid
the subject of Blazes Boylan, Marion and the
concert tour. He is perfectly certain that by this
time Boylan and Marion are past rehearsing
Love's Old Sweet Song. In the Ormond Hotel his
nerves were stilled and drugged with music, drink
and food, and he was. critical and taciturn. In
Barney Kiernan's they are set on edge by political
discussion. He becomes a man with a mission,
reforming the world by the force of the spoken
word. It is beautifully normal and logical that he
167
 JAMES J OYCE

shall seize the opportunity of making good on the

large field of society what he has lost in the family
bedroom, thus turning private woe into a source of
public weal. The ideas he defends are his own. He
always held humanity to be above races and creeds,
but on many occasions he would have let the Irish
nationalists talk their fill unopposed. His Irish
fellow citizens will have none of him as Irishman
or worldreformer, and so he goes one better. He
affirms his Judaism and becomes prophet and
messiah.
There is a strain of naivete in Bloom. He seems
not to know that oppressed nationalities have a
peculiar and ferocious snobbery that for exclusive­
ness far outdoes the snobbery of schools and clubs.
When he makes his perfectly reasonable claim as a
Jew to be regarded as belonging to an oppressed
people they look on him as a vile outsider, an
impudent gate-crasher. He is in the position of the
council schoolboy caught wearing a Harrow tie.
And when he adds to that a recital of the cultural
achievements of the Jews, one of which is the
Christian religion, there is nothing for it but the
ascent into heaven. On Irish soil there is no longer
room for him. Yet Bloom furthered the cause of
Irish nationalism. He informed Arthur Griffith of
the Hungarian scheme of action on which Sinn
Fein was founded although he must have done so
in a scientific, not a combative spirit. All the others
in Barney Kiernan's are proud, violent men,
willing to kill and be killed for their cause. Not so
Bloom. For him the human body, its well-being
and continued existence, is the greatest good, the
worthiest cause of all.
Hitherto for Bloom's past we have had to rely
on Bloom's memory. In The Cyclops episode Bloom's
recollections are extended and confirmed by the
1 68
 JAMES JOYCE

observation of Pisser Burke and the Nameless One.

Bloom once hung round an elderly female with a
view to being mentioned in her will. Cattle mer­
chant Joe Cuffe gave him the sack because he
cheeked a grazier customer. We learn, too, that
Bloom was once in danger of being proceeded
against on a charge of selling illegal lottery ticket.:;.
All these things are no doubt part of Bloom's
history, for neither Pisser Burke nor "I" invent
facts. They are too artistic to ignore nature. They
merely select, arrange and exaggerate. Joyce read
to me on the day he wrote it the passage, already
quoted, where "I" says: "I declare to my anti­
macassar if you took up a straw from the bloody
floor and if you said to Bloom: Look at, Bloom. Do
you see that straw? That's a straw . Declare to my aunt
he'd talk about it for an hour so he would and
talk steady;"
"You see," said Joyce, " 'I' is really a great
admirer ofBloom who, besides being a better man,
is also more cunning, a better talker, and more
fertile in expedients. If you reread Troilus and
Cressida you will see that of all the heroes Thersites
respects only Ulysses. Thersites admires Ulysses."

1 6g
 CHAPTER NINE
FROM the time of my meeting with Joyce to the
time of the completion of The Cyclops episode was a
period packed with great events. The Allies
gathered themselves together after the great Luden­
dorff offensive, took the . offensive themselves on all
fronts, and forced the Germans to sue for peace.
The influenza pestilence was very severe in Switzer­
land, and in the middle ofit came the general strike.
Cavalry patrols and an unending procession of
funeral hearses took the place of trams and trains
for a: week till the strike collapsed, as general strikes;
passive and aimless as they are, must collapse. They
state a problem but have no means of solving it.
. The soldiers who were called up from the peasant
cantons to protect the town of Zurich suffered
terribly in the epidemic. Khaki-clad, blue-clad
British and French soldiers invalided out of Ger­
many into Switzerland in exchange for badly
. wounded German and Austrian soldiers in French
and English captivity went back to their homes.
There was a hasty shutting-down of expensive
wartime institutions, including the one in which
I was employed, the Ministry of Information.
Typists and secretaries hurried to Versailles. Nations
began to beat their howitzers into typewriters for
the forthcoming series of conferences. Schiebers,
whispering business in . the corners of cafes, van­
ished, and their places were taken by official
representatives of international trade. Foreign
merchandise began to trickle in.
1 70
 JAMES JOYCE
,,
"Who won this war?
,, said Joyce.
"We shall know, I said, "when the mass produc­
tion goods come pouring in. The salesmen are the
new shock troops."
The first we saw were tins ofJapanese salmon at
eightpence a tin filling a shop window on the
Limmat Quai. We built no general conclusion on
this one fact, but we bought a tin apiece. It was
not ,until March 1 9 1 9 that the office to which I
was attached, then fully liquidated, dispensed with
my services.
Apart from its F ohn winds , dreaded by some,
Zurich is a pleasant place to live in. It is big enough
for solitude and small enough for intimacy. It can
be seen as a whole and thought of as a whole.
Friends are often, but not inevitably, met on the ·
Bahnhofstrasse. The cafes, wineshops and restaur­
ants are numerous , good and to suit all tastes. For
the elite there are the Elite and the Baur au Lac;
for the strong there are Spanish and Swiss wineshops
and Swiss beerhouses; for the indifferent, the
impecunious or the teetotallers there are the
alkoholfreie restaurants of the Frauenverein, and
for the lover of good wine there is, among others,
the Pfauen restaurant-cafe. The Pfauen was
Joyce's favourite and our general rendezvous.
Across the courtyard at the back of it was the
Pfauentheater, the smaller of the two municipal
theatres of Zurich. The standard of dramatic art
was very high there. I remember a wonderful
performance of Heinrich von Kleist's Der ,<,erbrochene
Krug, and I have often heard Joyce praise the
Bluntschli of Bruno Wunschmann and the Thersites
of Karstens.
The white wine at the Pfauen was excellent. I
never saw Joyce drink red wine unless white was
unobtainable, and then he did it with a bad grace.
171
 JAMES JOYCE
It is one of the few things on which he is rigidly
doctrinaire. When I asked the reason for his
preference he said:
"White wine is like electricity. Red wine looks
and tastes like a liquefied beefsteak."
A Fendant de Sion in carafe was the speciality
of the house. It was supplied by Mr. Paul Wieder­
kehr, who was a pupil ofJoyce and also the inventor
of that very drinkable temperance beverage Bilz�
b rause, now no longer ob tainab le, I understand,
for love or money. The colour of Fendant is a pale
greenish amber, and its taste suggests an earth rich
in copper ore.
"Er schmeckt nach Erz," said Paul Suter.
("It tastes like ore.")
And Joyce, staring thoughtfully and with malice
behinc;lthought, at the yellow-tinted contents of the
carafe, said slowly:
"Erzherzogin." ("Archduchess.")
And Erzherzogin it was and remained. Under
this guise, or by her Italian title more affected by
the Triestine Dubliner, this imaginary arciduchessa
has had many a brimming cup raised and lowered in
her Minnedienst.
The waitress knew our simple wants, and supplied
them without unnecessary questions and responses.
First came the carafe of Archduchess, and then
followed two Brissagos already aglow. Our table
was in a curtained-off corner of the establishment,
and was neighbour to the Stammtisch of a Student­
enkorps. The wall ab ove their table was decorated
with their caps and other symbols of their mysteries.
They drifted in at intervals, read correspondence
and papers, smoked pipes, talked little, and drank
beer. Joyce and I were, perhaps, the most punctual
attenders at the Pfauen, b ut Mrs. Joyce and Mr.
and Mrs. Sykes were often there, as were also Paul ·
1 72
 JA M E S JO Y CE

Suter and another Basler friend and colleague,

Danni Hummel. August Suter's work and family
kept him in Zollikon and prevented him from
paying the Stammtisch more than an occasional
visit. My friends Louis and Katherine Sargent
turned up for a few seances on the occasion of their
fortnight's stay in Zurich in 1 9 1 9.
The sculptors and painters of our little society
often went to the Spanish wineshops of Niederdorf,
but it was rare that Joyce met us in these haunts.
He found the sweet, syrupy and, probably, doctored
Spanish wines undrinkable. But one of August
Suter's sculptor assistants discovered an excellent
restaurant in the Augustinergasse, overshadowed by
the pile of the Augustiner-Kirche where worship
the Old-Catholics, seceders from the Roman Church
in 1 8 7 1 when the infallibility of the Pope was pro­
claimed a dogma. This restaurant, the August­
inerhof, was patronised by Zurich working men and
a group of Czechs, all lured, no doubt, by the
irresistible lure of a copious lunch at the modest
price of one franc fifty. When I told Joyce about it
he said:
"Good. I'm glad you told me. Some Greek
friends of mine were asking me if l knew of a cheap
restaurant. I'll tell them. You don't mind?"
I said I didn't, but I feared the worst. And in
fact, the Czechs discussing business and the Zurich
working men holding an inquest on each hand of
cards never made half the noise of this table full of
Greeks.
"Have they turned up yet?" asked Joyce. "What
do you think of them?"
"Not much," I said. It was a coincidence, of
course, but a line of Bellas occurred to me when I
looked at them: "Kill. Burn. Let not a Greek
escape."
1 73
 JAMES JOYCE

"That's Kriegspsychose," said Joyce. "Seriously,

they are very mce people, and they have been very
useful to me."
"Aren't they strangely like Jews?" I said. "They
look like Jews, and they all talk at once and nobody
listens."
"Not so strangely," said Joyce. "Anyway, they
are Greeks. And there's a lot to be said for the
theory that the Odyssey is a Semitic poem."
The Augustinerhof was also the rendezvous of a .
society of deaf mutes. Joyce regarded them as
symbols of ill-fortune. Paul Suter's nerves could
never ab ide their inhuman efforts at human
speech. For myself I considered it a duty of human
solidarity to suppress all nervous reactions in
presence of the afflicted brethren.
Joyce believed that the best gate of entry to the
spirit of ancient Greece was the modern Greek.
He told me something about my new lunchmates.
Nikola Santos was illiterate, but could recite many
long passages of the Odyssey· learned b y ear. Pavlos
Phokas bore the name of a Byzantine emperor, but
was clerk in a Zurich commercial house. Antonio
Chalas had written a book proving that the centre
of gravity of the earth passed through Athens, and
that therefore the great powers should guarantee
the perpetual immunity of Greece. He sent a copy
of this work to President Wilson, but whether his
opus played any great part in subsequent inter­
national councils is not recorded. Joyce must have
known a great number of the Zurich Greeks of those
days. I met only one of them, Mr. Paulo Ruggiero,
who was invaluable on Joyce's b irthday night (a
great event in the Joycean household) for the
preparation of middle eastern exotic dishes. He was
an amiable man, and as resourceful as he was
amiable. His one great wish was to return to his
1 74
 JAMES JO Y CE
native levantine land, but he is still, I believe, a
b ank emeloyee in Athens on the Limmat. The
name of Joyce's Jewish friends was legion, for the
rule regarding Greeks applied with still greater
force to the unchanging Jew, whose nationality is
fortified with religion. They were of all classes
and from all countries, and included rich merchants
and manufacturers of Zurich and poor Galician
immigrants.
"It was through the intervention of a Greek
merchant prince of the great house of Ralli and of a
Greek nobleman, Count Francesco de Sordina, the
Grand Seigneur of Trieste and one of the greatest
swordsmen in Europe in his time," said Joyce,
"that I was enabled to leave Austria in war time on
parole."
Believing that human nature is, in the main,
subdued to what it works in, like the dyer's hand,
I always regarded trade or caste as primary influ­
ences in forming character. Joyce, on the other
hand, attached greater weight to race, nation,
and to some real yet indefinite thing one might
call type.
Joyce's method of composition always seemed
to me to be that of a poet rather than that of a
prose writer. The words he wrote were far advanced
in his mind before they found shape on paper. He
was constantly and indefatigably in pursuit of the
solution to some problem of homeric correspondence
or technical expression or trait of character in
Bloom or another personage of Ulysses; or some
physiological fact was necessary to give him the
key to some part of his epic of tJ,e human body.
Sculptor or painter, daylight worker, having laid
aside the tools of his trade for the day, would
relax, but Joyce's preoccupation with his book was
never ending. He was always looking and listening
1 75
 JAMES JOYCE

for the necessary fact or word; and he was a great

believer in his luck. What he needed would come
to him. That which he collected would prove useful
in its time and place. And as, in a sense, the theme
of Ulysses is the whole of life, there was no end to
the variety of material that went to its building.
Of the time detail of 1 904 was none around him,
but what he saw and heard in 1 9 1 8 or 1 9 1 9 would
do just as well, for the shapes oflife remain constant:
only the dress and manners change. I have seen
him collect in the space of a few hours the oddest
assortment of material: a parody on the House
that Jack Built, the name and action of a poison,
the method of caning boys on training ships, the
wobbly cessation of a tired unfinished sentence,
the nervous trick of a convive turning his glass in
inward-turning circles, a Swiss music-hall joke
turning on a pun in Swiss dialect, a description of
the Fitzsimmons shift.
In one of the richest pages of Ulysses Stephen, on
the sea shore, communing with himself and tenta­
tively building with words, calls for his tablets.
These should have been library slips, acquired by
the impecunious and ingenious poet from the
library counter. On that occasion he had forgotten
to provide himself with this convenient writing
material, and was forced to use the fag-end of Mr.
Deasy's letter. As far as concerns the need for
tablets, the self-portrait was still like, only in
Zurich Joyce was never without them. And they
were not library slips, but little writing blocks
specially made for the waistcoat pocket. At inter­
vals, alone or in conversation, seated or walking,
one of these tablets was produced, and a word or
two scribbled on it at lightning speed as ear or
memory served his turn. No one knew how all this
material was given place in the completed pattern
1 76
 JAMES JOYCE

of his work, but from time to time in Joyce's flat

one caught glimpses of a few of those big orange­
coloured envelopes that are one of the glories of
Switzerland, and these I always took to be store­
houses of building material. The method of making
a multitude of criss-cross notes in pencil was a
strange one for a man whose sight was never good.
A necessary adjunct to the method was a huge
oblong magnifying glass. Early in 1919 Joyce had
reason to fear an eye attack and, to stave it off, left
Zurich, plagued with Fohn wind, and went to
Locamo. I accompanied him.
"What an experience it is," said Joyce, "to go
through the Gotthard tunnel. On one side of the
mountain everything is gloomy and depressing,
and on the other side everything is bright and
tonic."
One day in Locamo I had taken my painting
material out to the Delta and, tired of prospecting
for a motive, was lying on the grass, when Joyce
appeared between the trees.
"Take a look at this, will you?" he said. "I can't
make head or tail of it."
He handed me a leaf I recognised as having been
torn from the familiar waistcoat pocket block.
"Can you read it?" he .asked.
"I can't," said I. "There are about a dozen
words written in all directions, up, down and
across. I can't make out one complete word."
"Try with this," he said, handing me the magni­
fymg glass. "A few letters will do if you can't read
a whole word."
But the magnifying glass magnified also the pencil
smudges and made the labyrinth of pencilled lines
bigger but not clearer, so I had to give it up after
sighting and reporting several foggy shapes of letters
which, however, were sufficient to give him his
1 77
 J AM E S JOY C E
bearings. By the way, when I first met Joyce he
had undergone the first of his ten eye operations.
From time to time I have sought among painters
a correspondence for Joyce and his writing, but the
art of painting with oil paint has cultivated a
human quality that can render no service in Joyce's
workshop. Oil painting has, more than any other
creative art, demanded temperament ofits servants;
and temperament I define as the involuntary
co-operation of the body in the work of the mind.
Every great master of oil painting-Rembrandt,
Rubens, Delacroix-had this quality in great
measure and under due control. No writer can use
temperament as the painter can use it, but Joyce
has no use for it at all. Sudden impulses and
vehemences are to him a disturbance. They must
wait their turn, which is discouraging for them.
If there is a correspondence for Joyce's writing in
the pictorial arts it is the mosaic artists of Rome
and Ravenna who would supply it. No nervous
impulses created for them or disturbed their
handiwork. They built up with inexhaustible
patience their figures of saints and angels out of
tiny pieces of coloured stone.
The name Rembrandt has occasionally occurred
to me as a correspondence. Not in temperament,
colour, mood. In these respects no two artists were
ever less alike. Joyce paints in a light key and his
shadows are full of colour. But there are other
similarities. Both are adepts at the self and family
portrait, and both take ancient legends and present
them in the dress and accent of their own day.
Perhaps, too, just as Joyce may have seemed to us
to be a collector of words for words' sake, Rein­
brand t seemed to his neighbours to be a great
harbourer of junk for junk's sake in the shape of
odds and ends picked up in the market-place.
1 78
 JAMES JOYCE
Until, behold, the useless antique helmet, the
strange unwearable eastern gown, the odd-shaped
sword reappeared, flooded with light, in a picture,
clothing and adorning a brace of his neighbours,
true-to-life portraits yet with all the significance of
religious symbols. And in Joyce's case the word that
fell from the lips of car-driver or convive would be
noted on the waistcoat pocket block, receive its
shape and setting and be heard again with a new
intonation in the mouth of one of the personages
of his invention-wandering Jew, troglodyte or
bartender, but for sure a phantom portrait of one
of his neighbours.
Every artist loves his material as well as the
design to which it gives body-the painter his
precious colour; the sculptor his stone, metal, wood;
the stained glass artist his tinted hyaline; the poet
words. But to Joyce words are more than a pleasur­
able material out of which agreeable patterns can
be made, or thought and emotion communicated.
They are quick with human history as pitchblende
with radium, or coal with heat and flame. They
have a will and life of their own and are not to be
put like lead soldiers, but to be energised and
persuaded like soldiers of flesh and blood. The
commerce of life new mints them every day and
gives them new values in the exchanges, and Joyce
is ever listening for living speech from any human
lips.
"What a lot of nonsense is talked about style,"
he said.
This was apropos of The Oxen of the Sun.
Mr. Deasy said to Stephen: "To learn one must
be humble," and in the sense of listening and
learning Joyce certainly has the virtue of humility.
There is nothing snobbish in his devotion to his
material.
1 79
 JAMES JOYCE

A visitor to Joyce's apartment alluded to a

picture on the wall as a photograph. In mentioning
the fact to me, Joyce said:
"Now I couldn't see anything ridiculous in
that. It isn't the usual word, but surely light­
writing is a beautiful word to apply to a painted
picture."
Seeing words as mysterious means of expression
as well as an instrument of communication made
Joyce sometimes a severe critic ofhis contemporaries.
Not that he often praised or condemned or even
mentioned their productions. I once alluded to one
of his contemporaries as a great writer.
" Is he?" said Joyce. "What has he written?"
I began to describe a dramatic scene in a pro­
vincial hotel, when Joyce interrupted:
"Tell me something of it in his own words."
"Ah, the words. I can't remember the actual
words of the book."
"But why can't you?" said Joyce. "When you
remember a scene or a sonnet of Shakespeare you
can tell me about it in the words that conveyed it
to you. Why can't you do so in this case? Some
one passage ought to stick."
"Do you think that is necessary?"
"I do. When you talk painting to Taylor,
Sargent or Suter you don't talk about the object
represented but about the painting. It is the
material that conveys the image of jug, loaf of
bread, or whatever it is, that interests you. And
quite rightly, I should say, because that is where
the beauty of the artist's thought and handiwork
become one. If this writer is as good as you say he
is, I can't understand why some of his prose hasn't
stuck in your otherwise excellent memory."
Joyce's memory for the words of his own com­
positions and for those of all writers he admired was
1 80
 JAMES JOYCE

prodigious. He knew by heart whole pages of

Flaubert, Newman, de Quincey, E. Quinet, A. J.
Balfour and of many others. Most human memories
begin to fail at midnight, and lapse into the
vague and a peu pres, but not that of Joyce. It was
while we were at Locarno that we returned once to
our pension at about midnight, and sat for a while
in Joyce's room. We had been talking about
Milton's Lycidas, and I wanted to quote some lines
of it that pleased me. My memory gave out, but
Joyce said the whole poem from beginning to end,
an_d followed it up with L' Allegro. I wonder if
l\facaulay could h;we done as much at midnight
after a litre of Nostrano? Dante he knew as lover
and scholar, and he was an ardent admirer of Ver­
laine. One evening in my studio in the Seefeld­
strasse Paul Suter recited that poem of Verlaine
which begins :
Les roses etaient toutes rouges
Et les lierres etaient tout noirs.
Chere, pour peu que tu te bouges,
Renaissent tous mes desespoirs.
Joyce asked him to repeat it.
"That/' he said, "is perfection. No more beautiful
poem has ever been made.. And yet I wonder at
what hour, a.m. or p.m., are roses quite red and
ivy perfectly black?"
That same evening Joyce sang to us a passage
from Palestrina's Mass for Pope Marcellus, and
after that a medieval introit. His tenor voice pleased
my untrained ear. It made me think of stones lying
at the bottom of a river. He had a piano in his flat,
and often sang, but I never heard him sing better
than that night in the studio without any accompany­
ing instrument. He was in exceptional form, or it
was on account of the structure, mainly wood, and
entirely without hangings of any kind.
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 J AM E S JOY C E

I was a better judge of his voice as ah organ for

speaking verse. His gramophone records of the end
of Anna Liuia Plurabelle are typical of voice and
method. The lower pitch of his speaking voice is
darkly metallic, and he slows down the tempo of
the verse to the last reasonable degree to extract
from each syllable its full essence of sound. Shelley's
"When the lamp is shattered" is a poem I often
heard him speak, and occasionally he would
reinforce ·"O Love, who bewailest" with the gesture
of an upheld, straight stretched hand. Mangan, the
subject of one of his rare critical essays, was a
favourite of his among Irish poets. We often heard
him recite " Dark Rosaleen" and "O'Hussey's Ode
to the MacGuire." A poem of Yeats', new to
Joyce, appeared in The Little Reuiew, "When the
heart grows old." Joyce read it, and exclaimed:
"No living poet can write better than that."
"It sounds like the song of experience," I said.
We both agreed in admiring Coleridge, but when
I expressed great admiration for the lyrical dramas
of Shelley he objected:
"No doubt there is much beauty in Prometheus
Unbound and Bellas, but I feel that it's all on the
wrong track."
Joyce spoke Italian like a native. It was, and still
is, the house language of his family. In German he
was fluent, but I have heard him say of both
German and Italian that they were not "persuasive"
languages; and of French: "A poor instrument,
perhaps, beside Italian and English, but how won­
derfully they use it!" One evening, however, when
four of us were sitting in the Augustinerhof-Joyce,
Hummel, Paul Suter and myself-Joyce asked Paul
to repeat a poem in German, and Paul recited to
us the verses of the ill-fated Holderlin:
 JAMES JOYCE

Wo hist du? trunk.en dammert die Seele mir

Von aller deiner Wonne; denn eben ist's,
Das ich gesehn wie, milde seiner
Fahrt, der entzilckende Gotterjilngling
Die jungen Locken badet im Goldgewolk. . . .

And on this occasion Joyce expressed the opinion

that German was a rich, musical tongue. Joyce
studied Irish under Pearse, but Pearse's enthusiasm
for Irish led him often to disparage the English lan­
guage, and on this account he discontinued the
Irish lessons and turned his attention to Norwegian,
which he has studied ever since. To him, in any case,
Dublin is more a Scandinavian than a Celtic city.
The name, fate and work of Shakespeare shimmer,
a . recurrent colour motive, through the pages of
Ulysses. He was a Ulyssean type, a wanderer from
home, ever longing to return and at last returning.
Joyce pictures him in the full matunty of his
creative life, spurred on to creation by the certainty
of change and death. "In Gerard's rosery of Fetter
lane he walks, greyedauburn. One life is all. One
body. Do. But do." If he were not a constant
preoccupation with Joyce his shade would not have
haunted Dublin on Bloomsday, 1 904. Therefore
it was a slight shock to me when I heard Joyce
with an accent of conviction refuse him pre­
eminence as a dramatist. The man himself with his
human problem, the mystery of his destiny, the
inventor of a throng of thoughts and forms, above
all the peerless master of words : Yes. But as a
dramatist he placed him far below Ibsen. It was
shortly after I had met Joyce that we were sitting
in the Astoria cafe one evening and talking of the
play. Joyce asked me what as drama I found
excellent in Shakespeare. I cited at raridom the
despair of Othello: "I pray you in your letters . . /'
"Yes," said Joyce. "I see the pathos of the
1 83
 JAMES JOYCE

situation and the force of the words , but not the

tragic conflict. When Rubek and Irene meet in
When we Dead Awaken, the one spiritually dead,
the other, into whom his genius had passed, fiercely
alive yet without power to give form to the life
within her, their most trivial word is more dramatic
than all the magical verses of Othello.
Nevertheless, when the question, often put,
"If on a desert island what one book?" was again
raised, Joyce said:
"I should hesitate between Dante and Shake­
speare but not for long. The Englishman is richer
and would get my vote."
Of all the great nineteenth century masters of
fiction Joyce held Flaubert in highest esteem. When
I mentioned Balzac, he said:
"I am inclined to think that Balzac's reputation
rests on a lot of neat generalisations about life."
I asked him if he did not think Dostoevsky a
supremely great writer.
"No," said Joyce, bluntly. "Rousseau, confessing
to stealing silver spoons he had really stolen, is
much more interesting than one of Dostoevsky's
people confessing to an unreal murder."
"And what about Tolstoy?"
"He is different," Joyce said. "Tolstoy is a great
writer. Think of the story of the rich man's devotion
to his poor manservant-Master and Man. After
Flaubert the best work in novel form has been done
by Tolstoy, Jacobt en and D'Annunzio."
Of modern English fiction writers Joyce spoke
little, and I suspected that that was what he
thpught, but I have heard him express admiration
for the work of George Moore. Speaking of Esth(f
Waters, he said:
"Strange that it should have been left to an Irish­
man to write the best novel of modern English life!"
1 84
 JAMES JOYCE

Very often, however, he would break off his

references to other writers with a hasty, "But,
you know, I don't pretend to be a good critic."
And this I took to be neither an attitude of modesty
nor a fear of committing himself, but a plain
statement of a necessary limitation; for the artist's
admirations and denials are active forces in shaping
and directing his own work. He cannot allow
himself the luxury of catholicity.
While Joyce was planning and composing The
Cyclops episode of his book h� reread Swift. At the
same time Thackeray's essay on Swift came into
my hands. We were walking down the Ra mistrasse
when, the Uetliberg before us suggesting a giant ,
Joyce said:
"Swift treated the giant-dwarf theme a little too
simply. He just multiplies or divides by twelve,
and forgets that when you multiply or divide you
create another organism. There must be a relative
difference of speed, resistance to air pressure, and
so on."
I mentioned Thackeray's opinion that Swift was
an Englishman, to which Joyce demurred, both on
account of Swift being born in Dublin and of much
in his character that is essentially Irish.
"Thackeray writes also of Swift's secret grief," I
said.
"Yes? What do you make of that?"
" I suppose," I said, "that the proud, sens1t1ve
man needed love but that pride robbed him of the
power of self-surrender that love demands of man
or woman."
"Maybe," said Joyce. "But that isn't enough.
The reason must be not latent but manifest. Any­
way, the man was a strong and stingy sentimentalist.
He meddled with and muddled up two women's
lives."
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 J AMES J OY C E
Joyce was a great admirer of Defoe. He possessed
his complete works, and had read every line of
them. Of only three other writers, he said, could he
make this claim: Flaubert, Ben Jonson and Ibsen.
Robinson Crusoe he called the English Ulysses. Joyce
read to me once the Prologue to The Canterbury Tales,
stopping often to repeat the lines and retaste the
elegant humour of each one.
"Of all English writers Chaucer is the clearest. He
is as precise and slick as a Frenchman."
Music was an art on which Joyce could talk with
authority, and Zurich in the days when we were
there was a great town for the music lover. We
were sitting in the Astoria cafe one evening when
the band, after playing a fragment of Beethoven,
began Mozart's Don Giovanni overture.
"Listen," said Joyce. "How full of grace and
invention is Mozart after the muscle-bound Beet­
hoven."
When the Mozart overture was finished Joyce
said:
"Beethoven is generally regarded as greatest of
all musicians. Is there any painter who would be
given the same place among painters?"
I said I thought if any pre-eminence were
accorded it would be to Michelangelo.
One evening, while Joyce was writing The Sirens
episode, he went to hear Bach's Matthiius Passion.
When I met him afterwards I asked him if he had
enjoyed the music. He was silent for a moment,
then said:
"I simply cannot understand how any man can
mix the synoptic gospels with the gospel according
to Saint John."
And I never knew whether he enjoyed Bach's
music or not. He was a great admirer of Palestrina,
and that not alone for Palestrina's musical achieve-
186
 J AMES JOY CE
ments. It was as something of a hero that he
regarded the great Italian.
"In writing the Mass for Pope Marcellus," said
Joyce, "Palestrina did more than surpass himself as
a musician. With that great effort, consciously
made, he saved music for the Church."
I once asked Joyce what in all music he considered
most beautiful.
"The flute solo in Gluck's Orpheus," he said. "It
tells of the sick longing for earth of one in Elysian
fields. I know ofnothing more beautiful than that."
Of all instruments the human voice was Joyce's
preference, and of all voices the tenor voice. He
had heard de Reszke in Paris. That was a voice
he said, that in quality reminded him ofhis father's
voice. He had yet to hear the Franco-Irish Sullivan,
for him the tenor in excelsis. He was not a great
admirer of Wagner, with the exception of die
Meistersinger ( some famous passages were Bierhalle
music) but, in any case, he could listen to opera for
the singing alone. The music of the giants in
Rheingold was perfectly expressive of creative un­
reproductive beings.
Joyce always disclaimed any knowledge of the
plastic and pictorial arts, but he said he had more
feeling for sculpture than for painting. He claimed
to have been one of the first to recognise the genius
of Mestrovic. My own objection to Mestrov1c's
work as Magic City sculpture he rebutted by
showing me a photograph of one piece he particu­
larly admired of the Mestrovic of 1 9 1 0. It was a
relief of a mother and child, and was certainly a
work far superior to the exaggerated gestures I
had in mind. He picked up a little statuette in
Zurich, in plaster I think, representing a woman
in modern dress, seated, with a cat on her shoulder.
We told him we could see no merit in it.
187
 J AMES J OYCE

"But why isn't it good?" said Joyce.

"Because it has no plastic expression at all,"
said Paul Suter. "You are reading literature into it.''
Paul was right. But perhaps the sculptors and
painters of the last few decades, in their reaction
against anecdote and history, have developed an
unnecessary purism in respect of the literature in
their productions. They are not content with the
purity of their plastic or pictorial vision but, like
Emerson's Englishman when the subject of religion
was broached, they begin to fidget uneasily when
anyone sees a content in their work. Yet this might
be a pleasing revelation. On one of the walls of
Joyce's flat in the Universitatsstrasse was pinned a
photograph of a Greek statue of Penelope. It
represented a woman, draped, seated, looking at
her upheld foi·efinger. Paul Suter and I went to
the flat one evening to plaster up a troublesome
mousf".hole at the back of the stove with plaster
brought from August's studio in Zollikon. Joyce
swore that Z'ch was visited by an eighth plague of
mice. I never noticed it. We stayed on for a glafs
of Fendant and a Brissago.
"What is she thinking about," said Joyce
pointing to the photograph of the sculptured
Penelope.
"She is weighing up her wooers," I said, "trying
to decide which one of them will make the inost
manageable husband."
"To me,'' said Paul, "she seems to be saying:
'I'll give him just one week more.' "
"My own idea," said Joyce, "is that she is trying
to recollect what Ulysses looks like. You see, he
has been away many years, and they had no
photographs in those days."
When I showed him a photograph of Bourdelle's
Penelope he looked on it with disfavour and said:
1 88
 JAMES JOYCE

"That, reminds me of modern commentators on

Homer.'
In spite of his bad sight and his professed lack of
expert knowledge of painting, Joyce's flat is full of
pictures. There are portraits of his greatgrandfather,
James ; and greatgrandmother Ann, born McCann;
and of his grandfather James as man and boy; and
grandmother Ellen, born O'Connell (through whom
Joyce is related to Daniel O'Connell,. the Liberator),
all by Comerford of Cork. Then there are portraits
of himself, Giorgio and his father painted by Tuohy,
and two drawings of himself, one by Wyndham
Lewis and one by Augustus John; a portrait of Lucia
by Marie Laurencin, and one of his daughter-in-law
by Marchand, portraits of Mrs.Joyce by Silvestri and
myself and, among many other pictures, two
studies of the Liffey by Jack Yeats and works by
Umberto Veruda, Marie Monnier and Ivan Opfer.
And besides all the original work there are the
reproductions of the masters he admires, notably
Vermeer.
Notwithstanding his professions to the contrary,
Joyce is in reality a good judge of painting, and he
looks, as all good critics do, for the personal quali­
ties behind the material expression. That criticism
which pretends to be standoffishly technical is
always make-believe. We should be able to perceive
at once the pure, serene and generous mind of
Corot in the crystal clearness of his painting, and
none of Picasso's ingenious disguises should hide
from us the maudlin self-pity of the blue period
which shines through them all. But Joyce's eyesight
made his manner of looking at pictures strange and
peculiar. I have seen him take pictures, when their
size allowed him to do so, and look at them close
up near a window like a myope reading small
print. Perhaps (I never asked him) the facture of
189
 J AMES JO Y C E
,
the painting, the pigment itself, is, in the language of
Stephen, a signature there for him to read as it is for
the painter. I wondered how he could ever see
anything in a picture at that range until I remem­
bered that, making allowance for difference of
sight, I did the same thing myself. At the end of his
examination he would always attribute to the
paintmg the qualities it in fact had. Of my study
for the portrait of Mrs. Joyce he wrote to me in
19 19 (I was staying at the time with Louis and
Katherine Sargent in Zermatt): "It seems to my
barbarian eye a delicate and provocative object."
But of the portrait of himself he urged me, "for the
love of Manfield'', to let people know that the rather
outsize Jaeger houseboots were no criterion to the
size of the enclosed feet. The difficulty about
painting Joyce was to get him to sit at all. The
moment arrived when he was suffering from eye
trouble and was confined to a semi-darkened room.
I accepted the light as I found it and the pose most
natural to him. Joyce, when not standing or
moving, prefers to lie down but will accept as a
workable compromise a sprawl in an easy chair.
Mrs. Joyce was an exceptionally good sitter. She
sat to me in the studio lent to me by August Suter,
came always to time, and posed steadfastly during
the whole sitting.
It was in this studio that Joyce put to me one day
Stephen's question to Lynch in their talk on
aesthetics: "If a man hacking in fu ry at a block of
wood make there an image of a cow, is that image
a work of art ?" I didn't know the right answer,
but am inclined to think it should be "Yes." . If a
writer were a sleepwalker and in his sleep wrote a
page of his book, that page, if worthy, would be
allowed to stand part of the text. How it found its
way there is a historical consideration. But it
190
 JAMES JOYCE
seemed to me, in any case, that works of art are so
rarely produced in this manner that for all practical
purposes (t4e only purposes I had ever considered)
the question would hardly arise.
Joyce frequently alluded to the ceremony, history
and dogma of the Catholic Church; and I sup­
posed that this was because the Church, like the
city of Dublin and the Odyssey, was a part of himself
and his history. If the Protestant-Roman Catholic
split in Christendom was mentioned he would
usually observe that a coherent absurdity is prefer­
able to an incoherent one. Quite right, philo­
sophically, no doubt, but religions are also secular
institutions, and from this angle their relative
absurdity is less important than the question of the
good or harm they do. He did not consider Jesus
Christ a perfect man.
"He was a bachelor," said Joyce, " and never
lived with a woman. Surely living with a woman is
one of the most difficult things a man has to do,
and he never did it."
Joyce talked rarely of perversity or crime. One
saw in him none of that natural awareness of sexual
perversity characteristic of Proust, none of Dostoev­
sky's preoccupation with the nightmare of crime.
Both these aspects of life he saw from without, and
in the main they were to him comic. He regarded
the English interest in crime in the shape of the
detective story as exceptionally ludicrous, and
considered the English (I don't know on what
grounds, for the French, too, have their Fantomas
and Grand Guignol) prone to thoughts of �rime.
0:p. one subject he was more uncommunicative
than any man I know: the subject of politics. He
often spoke of Parnell with great admiration, but
it was the mystical realist navigating the bark of his
reputation through the whirlpool of The Times
191
 JAM E S JO Y C E
commission that interested him and not his political
principles. An occasional vague reference to the
pacific American anarchist, Tucker, was the only
indication I ever heard of a political outlook. His
view seemed to be that government is work for the
specialist; , and the artist, another specialist, had
better leave it alone. And then government is in the
last resort the use of force, whereas the artist's
method is persuasion. True, the artist, like the rest
of the world, is also a citizen, and laws are made for
him to obey and taxes are levied for him to pay.
Actively or passively he is a member of the social
organisation. "Then let it be passively," would
express roughly Joyce's attitude. In short, il cultivait
sonjardin. Generally, if a political discussion arose he
would remain silent waiting a turn of the tide; but
once in the Augustinerhof I said to him:
"Some artists do take an active part in the life
of the State. They feel they want to do something
for their kind, and they look on the State as an
instrument. They want to leave the world better
than they found it."
"Or perhaps more like themselves," said Joyce.
"Very likely," I said. "But don't you think they
are justified?"
"If they think they are, certainly," said Joyce.
"But it isn't my function. And don't you think
that when it is a question of bettering and saving
the world, the artist has a means nearer to hand
than politics?"
"You mean the agency of beauty?"
Joyce nodded, and I saw that this was as much
as he was capable of giving assent to.
There is nothing that more characterises a man
than how he laughs and why he laughs, and
nothing so difficult to hide or affect. The mask of
melancholy or solemnity sits well on a man, but a
192
 JAMES JOYCE

mask of laughter would be an intolerable grimace,

and useless, for it would deceive no one. Joyce's
sense of humour was of a tonic and refreshing kind
that delighted in strange words, puns, incongruities,
odd situations, exaggerations and impish angles of
vision. There was no sniggering defeatism in it ;
it was not a bitter, sardonic humour, nor did one
ever feel that it was an armour for a vulnerable
sensibility. All readers of Joyce's books must have
been struck with his gift for mimicry in literature,
but if he possesses this gift in the spoken word or
in gesture he hides the light of it carefully under a
bushel. Mimicry in three-dimensional space can
often seem unkind, and Joyce's humour is for his
own and his friends' pleasure. Slick verbal wit he
never practised among his friends, nor was he an
habitual maker of epigrams in the sense of Wilde
or Whistler. He kept literature for his books.
His humour was altogether unforced and boyish.
In impish moods he is the magpie, gloating gravely
with bright eyes over the efforts of clumsy humans
to find the hidden orange-peel. During our stay in
Locarno in the spring of 1919 I came back to lunch
one day and found Joyce with a particularly gleeful
expression on his face. I asked for a share in the joke.
"What do you call that village of yours?" said
Joyce.
"You mean the village where I was born?" I said.
"Crowhurst."
"I know," said Joyce. "But when a uniformed
official came this morning to get our names and
pedigrees for the visitors' tax I told him your birth­
place was Crow's Thirst. It was that double litre
ofNostrano of ours on the pension table that caught
my eye and made me say it."
The following is a story he told Paul Suter and
me one evening in the Pfauen:
1 93
 JAMES JOY C E

"A German lady called to see m e to-day. She

is a writer and wanted me to give an opinion on her
work, but she told me she had already shown it to
the porter of the hotel where she stays. So I said
to her: 'What did your hotel porter think of your
work?' She said: 'He objected to a scene in my
novel where my hero goes out into the forest, finds
a locket of the girl he loves, picks it up and kisses it
passionately.' 'But,' I said, 'that seems to me to be
a very pleasing and touching incident. What did
your hotel porter find wrong with it?' And then
she tells me he said: 'It's all right for the hero to
find the locket and · to pick it up and kiss it, but
before he kissed it you should have made him wipe
the dirt off it with his coat sleeve.' "
"And what did you tell her?" said Paul and I
together.
"I told her," said Joyce " (and I meant it too)
to go back to that hotel porter and always to take
his advice. 'That man,' I said, 'is a critical genius.
There is nothing I can tell you that he can't tell
you..' "
One evening in the Pfauen the conversation
turned on types of feminine beauty, and I said that
I had read somewhere of a king of some cannibal
island or other who lined the women folk of the
tribe, 'naked backs agaimt a long horizontal pole.
With his royal eye he enfiladed the exposed pos­
teriors, and the possessor of that of greatest pro­
minence he chose for his royal consort. Joyce
listened till I had finished the description, then said
without a ghost of a smile :
"I sincerely hope that when Bolshevism finaI1y
sweeps the world it will spare that enlightened
potentate."
On festive occasions and with a suitable stimulus,
beribboned and wearing a straw picture hat (Auto-
1 94
 JAMES JO Y C E

lycus turned pedant and keeping school, Malvolio

snapping up unconsidered trifles) Joyce would
execute a fantastic dance. It was not a terpsichorean
effort of the statuesque Isadora Duncan variety, but
a thing of whirling arms, high-kicking legs, gro­
tesque capers and coy grimaces that suggested
somehow the ritual antics of a comic religion.
"You look like David," I said, "leaping and
dancing before the ark."
As I have said, August Suter made six figures in
stone for the Amtshauser in Zurich. I stood for
one of them, and even in the frozen music of stone
the likeness persists. It always amused Joyce vastly
to see this over-lifesize stone effigy resembling me
gazing sternly down upon the free burgesses of
Switzerland's commercial capital; and whenever
a few of us on our way to the Usteristrasse passed
under that gaze at a late hour, he would execute
his comic ritual dance in honour of the stone guest,
to whom would be poured out suitable libations.
This tendency to invent dance figures he must have
passed on to his daughter Lucia, who made the
most promising beginnings in the art of dancing.
She has since, however, abandoned the plastic
rhythm of the dance for the more durable still
movement of illumination as exemplified in her
initial letters to Joyce's Pomes Penyeach and to the
A.B.C. poem of Chaucer.
Both Joyce and myself experienced in our youth
those vintage years of popular song associated with
the names of Dan Leno, Harry Randall, Tom
Costello, Gus Elen, Arthur Roberts and the other
music-hall giants of that time. Then the dollar
had not yet beat the pound, and people who lived
in the Old Kent Road had not discovered that they
had Old Kentucky Homes or Coal Black Mammies
in Tennessee. What of that great epoch we knew
1 95
 JAMES JOYCE
we sang. Joyce could add Blarney Castle, Bil[y me
luv me lad and some "Come all yous", and I a
shanty or two, so that our musical soirees were
rich in genuine folksong.
The actual writing of U[ysses occupied Joyce
about eight years. For half of that time all Europe
was at war : and peace, when it came, was as
disturbing as, though less destructive than, war.
Several revolutions shook the world. Crowns
and currencies fell. No permanence was in the air.
A dozen times in that period Joyce changed his
domicile. The Abbe Sieyes, asked what he did
under the terror, replied: "J'ai vecu.'' Joyce, if
asked what he did during the Great War, could
reply: "I wrote U[ysses." He was of an extra­
ordinary toughness of fibre and tenacity of purpose,
but neither toughness nor tenacity would have
helped him if he had not possessed the faculty of
shutting out at will all noises in the street, if he
had not been able not · to be unduly distressed
about what he could not alter. Every man with a
self-imposed task in any field of creative effort
knows the difficulties that beset him within and
without. Van Gogh said that well might the
symbol of Saint Luke, patron saint of painters,
be an ox, for without the patience and strength of
an ox no man could paint. The financial problem
has to be faced and solved a� well as may be.
Hostility and indifference must be overcome, and
allies found and cultivated. Doubts and fatigues
arise. Sickness comes, or an infertile patch, when,
with the best will in the world, the machine refuses
to work. And all these things are not alone obstacles
to be surmounted, but material to be turned to
account. It was part of Joyce's code of action
never to turn to journalism when in need. Requests
for articles from his pen arrived occasionally in
1 96
 JAMES JOYCE
Zurich, but met with a refusal, one and all, al­
though the money would have been acceptable.
Joyce's distaste for the subject and his sense of
expediency would account for the negative in the
case of political articles, but requests for literary
articles shared the same fate. He felt that journalism
and Ulysses would not run well in double harnes5.
One saw little in Joyce of the normal impatiences
of the average male. A retarded meal, a bus or a
post missed, or any of the · smaller annoyances of
life, called forth no show of irritability. When faced
with the hostility or illwill of another human being
his comment would purposely be toned down to the
subnormal "tedious" and "tiresome," . and his
strongest term of abuse applied to such persons
was the word "lout." The schooling of his reactions
in fourteen years of Jesuit training accounted, I
thought, for a good deal of this moderation, but
there was more in 1t than a habit of self-discipline.
It always seemed to me that he felt that giving way
to irritability or anger might hinder his specialist's
preoccupation with the detail of daily life as material
for literature. A great collector of his neighbours'
oaths (see the Citizen in The Cyclops episode, and
Private Carr in Circe) , Joyce himself never or rarely
swore by one god or nine. His favourite exclama­
tion when annoyed was a crisply uttt>red, but in
content harmless Italian, "Ma che !" He has little
feeling of attachment to animals. Flowers appeal to
him but little. Only for trees arriong all organic
forms has he a pronounced sympathy.
Joyce i5 a superstitious man. He accepts the
popular superstitions with regard to colours and
stones and numbers, and he sometimes, like the
rest of us, invokes the aid of the tree god, but to all
these he adds a few private superstitions of his own.
One of these is the ascribing to the words he writes
1 97
 J AMES JOY C E
a singular force of prophecy. Here are two examples :
Stephen, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Yo ung Man,
talking to McCann, uses the words : "Do you think
you impress me when you flourish your wooden
sword?" Several years later the original of McCann
was out in a Sinn Fein rising and improvised a
service of order, himself taking the street in corn pany
of a few comrades armed with blackthorn cudgels
(a good substitute for wooden swords). They were
arrested by a British officer, and McCann met his
death before a firing party. The original of Davin,
to whom Stephen says that he will make the next
revolution with hurleysticks, became Lord Mayor
of Limerick and was dragged from his bed and shot
by Black and Tans. When Lynch deserts Stephen
in the Circe episode, Stephen says : "Et laqueo se
suspendit." Years afterwards the original of Lynch
inherited a small fortune, went to London,
spent it all and then threw himself into the
Thames. Nuns bring ill, Greeks good luck.
The multiplicity of technical devices in Ulysses is
proof that Joyce subscribed to no limiting aesthetic
creed, and proof also that he was willing to use any
available instrument that might serve hj.s purpose.
It was hardly likely that, having denied all religious
dogma, and having carefully avoided all political
doctrine, he would submit to artistic limitations.
There are hints of all practices in Ulysses--cubism,
futurism, simultanism, dadaism and the rest-and
this is the clearest proof that he was attached to
none of the schools that followed them. At one
time in Zurich I wanted to learn Italian and, as a
reading exercise, Joyce lent me Boccioni's book on
futurism. I quoted to him one full-sounding phrase
I had learned: "Noi futuristi italiani siamo senza
passato." "E senza avvenire," said Joyce. Any
other doctrine would have called forth the same .
1 98
 J AMES J OYCE
comment. The sworn foe of ·sensibility in art is
doctrine. When an artist believes in no creed he is
the more likely to believe in himself, in what he
sees, hears, experiences. Hence, I think, the stream
of actual life that flows so strongly through the
pages of Ulysses. Any partisan pledges would have
cramped it in one way or another. Hence the
insistence on the mystery of the body, which is the
medium of experience. One brief life is here with
its creative possibilities, and death is before us to
make us humble and tolerant. Apropos of one
conttntious critic Joyce observed: "What a pity
it is we don't take our coffins round with us like
Chinese. It would give us a better sern.e of
perspective."
Joyce displayed humour and tenacity enough in
his dispute with the British Consulate General in
Zurich, but an Englishman would probably have
been more sceptical. I felt that, as an Iri�hman and
an exile, he was surprised and disappointed that
Englishmen failed to live up to the reputation
invented for them by their friends. It was, perhaps,
strange that I had heard nothing of the affair before
meeting Joyce, seeing that I was an employee of
the Consulate, but that was probably due to the
fact that I worked in a consular sideshow called
the Handelsabteilung situated about ten minutes'
walk away from the Consulate proper. A day or
two after our dinner at Taylor's pension on the
Zurichberg, Taylor referred to tht. affair but
without telling me the story of it. He said:
"No doubt Joyce has a grievance, but what he
doesn't understand is that all these people are out
for a quiet life."
Very likely Taylor was right, and his remark would
apply to official institutions in all- countries. It
means that "we don't want no trouble" was an old
1 99
 JAMES J OY C E

departmental device before the gaffer of all gang­

sters made it his own.
The history of the trouble was told to me by
Joyce one evening in the Astoria Cafe. Joyce
arrived in Zurich with practically no resources at
all. Three well-wishers in England, George Moore,
Mr. W. B. Yeats and the late Sir Edmund Gosse,
hearing of his plight, were influential in securing for
him a gift of £ 1 00 from the Privy Purse. The gift was
unconditional, but it came to Joyce's ears that at
least one of the intermediaries thought he ought to
do something for the Allied cause. This, in Joyce's
case, could mean only one thing-write for it.
But Joyce's preoccupation with Ulysses, his own
dista�te for politics and also his parole to the
Austrian Government, forbade any such incursion
into the field of war journalism. What to do that
would show his acknowledgment and yet not
harm his work or break his parole? Give plays in
English, came the answer of a Zurich friend. With
the assistance of Mr. Claude Sykes, who had acted
in the company of Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, and
who was an enthusiastic producer of plays ofliterary
quality, and of Mrs. Sykes, known on the English
stage as Miss Daisy Race, he founded the English
Players,* for the purpose of giving plays in the
English tongue m Swiss towns. That able actor, Mr.
Tristan Rawson, aided powerfully in the enterprise,
and Englishmen and Engfahwomen living in Zurich
w.ere mobilised in its support around the solid
nucleus of professional talent. In this way it came
about that Mrs. Joyce played Maurya in Synge's
Riders to the Sea, and that after the Armistice I
played Stingo in Goldsmith's Sht Stoops to Conquer.
* Not to be confused with the capable company of professional players
who, under Messrs. Stirling and Reynolds, have fought for se,·eral years
past a similar uphill battle against indifference, if not actual neglect.
200
 JAMES JOYCE

Joyce's functions were numerous and important.

He aided in the business arrangements, sang "off"
or prompted as required, and had a general ad­
visory voice in the proceedings. He did everything,
in short, but act. He sang "off" in a performance
of Browning's In a Balcony, and this was the occasion
that inspired the poem beginning, "They mouth
love's language," published in Pomes Penyeach. It
was a reasonable expectation on the part of the
English Players that their efforts would meet with
consular approval, and receive official consular
support as a valuable piece of British cultural
propaganda, but the consulate, for some reason or
other, refused its blessing. Nevertheless, when a
performance of Wilde's The Importance ofBeing Earnest
was given in the theatre of the Kaufmannische
Verein a temporary employee of the British Con­
sulate played the part of Algernon Moncrieff. I
saw the performance. It was given before I became
a consular employee, and it seemed to me a good
one. The next day Joyce, in the exercise of part of
his many functions, strolled round to the consulate
to hand the actor the modest actor's fee which was
his due, but the latter, on opening the pay envelope,
became indignant and said, in effect:
"What the hell do you call this? Don't you know
I spent much more than this in buying new trousers
for the performance?"
"I am sorry," said Joyce, "if the fee contained in
the envelope appears to you to be inadequate. But
I shall be obliged if you will address any complaint
on that score to Mr. Sykes, as I am only his agent
in the matter and acting according to the instruc­
tions on his paysheet. "
Evidently the atmosphere became quickly heated, ·
for Joyce told me that, in spite of all his politeness,
at a certain point in the discussion the com,ular
20 I
 JAMES JOYCE

employee told him he would "wring his bloody

neck and chuck him down the �tairs" but for the
fact that he had .heard that he was ill. Joyce's
closing remark on leaving the consulate was:
''That is not language that should be used in a
government office."
That same day he addressed a letter to the
Consul-General demanding an apology within
twenty-four hours, or he would take legal pro­
ceedings for threatened assault.
"I think I was perfectly justified, don't you?"
said Joyce.
Unformulated but active throughout the affair
were the two different conceptions of consular
powers and functions.
"I've seen it here," said Joyce, "and I've seen it
elsewhere. These people look upon themselves as
representatives of the King, and expect me to go
to them cap in hand, but I look upon them as
functionaries who are paid by my father in Dublin
to look after my interests when I am abroad. I think
mine is the sounder conception in law. What?"
No apology was forthcoming, so Joyce instituted
legal proceedings at once. He appealed also from
the consulate to the legation in Berne and, receiving
no satisfaction from that quarter, he wrote to an
Irish Member of Parliament and to the Prime
Minister, the Right Hon. David Lloyd George,
who replied, wishing the English Players every
success. The letter from the Prime Minister was
framed and displayed in a prominent position in
the window of a tobacco shop right under the
offices of the Consulate General.
"I always appeal to the highest instance," said
Joyce. "Stephen appeals from Father Dolan to
Father Conmee, the rector, and l now from the
Consul-General to the Prime Minister."
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 JAMES J O YCE
As is usual in Switzerland, the parties were called
before the conciliation court to see if litigation
might be avoided. Here Joyce asked if he might
speak to his adversary in English, and the Friedens­
richter gave him permission to do so. Joyce then
produced the balance sheet of the English Players,
turned to his opponent and invited him to examine
the accounts and decide for himself whether or not
the remuneration he received was in the circum­
stances of the company, a reasonable one. The
young man wavered for a moment but then
refused to examine the figures on the grounds that
he had no guarantee that they were accurate.
Meeting with such. a rebuff there was nothing left
for Joyce to do but to proceed with the case before
a court of law.
After corn,iderable delay the case came up for
judgment. There were in fact three cases to be
decided. (a) Joyce sued the consular employee for
the price of three unpaid-for tickets of admission
to a performance of The Importance of Being Earnest;
( b) the consular employee counter-claimed for the
price of clothes specially purchased for the per­
formance. The garments fitted well, but his claim
for _{,_ 19 1 5s., alternatively £12, was surely allowing
for the outlay on generous lines; (c) finally there
was Joyce's action against the consular employee
for threats of violence. The consulate made a bad
start in claiming extra-territorial privilege. This is
accorded always against the grain to an embassy.
It was not at all likely that the pri'9ilege would be
accorded to a consulate. Naturally the claim was
refused.
Cases (a) and ( b) were heard before the Bez.irks­
gericht Zurich on the 1 5th October, 1918, Judge
Billeter presiding. In case (a) Joyce's opponent
was ordered to pay Dr. James Joyce the sum of
203
 JAMES JOYCE

£r, plus interest at 5 per cent., from the 3rd, May

1 918. Case (b) the counter claim against Dr. James
Joyce for £19 15s., alternatively £12, was dis­
allowed, the costs in both cases to be borne by
Joyce's adversary who, in addition, was ordered to
pay to Dr. James Joyce £2 10s. by way of damages.
So far so good. But there was yet the third and, to
Joyce, most important case. What law's delays
intervened I don't know. When, however, the case
should have been heard both Joyce's opponent and
the only witness who could have testified to the
truth of Joyce's allegations had already left. The
case therefore fell to the ground, but the costs of
the court had to be met, and Joyce was ordered to
pay £4 16s. ( 120 Swiss francs) . This he resolved
not to do, and the court, after the usual delay,
n.otified him that they would proceed by way of
distraint. Furniture was none to be distrained upon,
as the Joyce family occupied a furnished apartment,
but the polite officer of the court came, neverthe­
less, to have a look round. The books? No, he
could not take them. Books are the tools of the
writer's trade. Typewriter? No, for in Joyce's
special case (his eye trouble) a typewriter was
considered a necessity.
"Then," said the official, "I am afraid, Herr
Doktor, that I must ask you to show me what
money you have on you."
Joyce produced his wallet. It contained a
hundred francs, which he thought would be
allowed him for the immediate needs of his family.
He was wrong by forty per cent. The officer was
obliged. to trouble Herrn Doktor for forty francs.
There was nothing further to be done. News of
Joyce's dispute with the British Consulate spread
to America, and an admirer of his writings, one of
the editors of the American review, The Dial,
204
 JAMES JOYCE
cabled ten thousand Swiss francs for the furtherance
of Joyce's cause. When the money arrived in the
spring of I g r g Joyce had already severed his official
connection with the English Players in order that
the activities and success of that enterprise might
not be prejudiced by association with himself.
Nevertheless, he handed over the greater part of
the money to the English Players. For that organ­
isation it must be said that, in spite of official
opposition, both passive and active, its members
gave upwards of forty performances in most of the
larger towns of Switzerland.
On the whole one may say that Joyce got dis­
tinctly the better of his contest with the consulate.
And if the manifest objects over which the dispute
was waged appear to be small, the principle involved
in the dispute was of the highest importance. The
relation of one citizen to another is never a trifling
matter, nor is the relation of the simple citizen to
a department entrusted with authority a trifle. It
was, no doubt, at first a very disturbing affair to
a writer with a task before him like the writing of
Ulysses, but it would not have been Joyce if he had
failed to see the humour of it or if, in the long run,
he had failed to extract out of the incident material
for his book. It inspired him also to compose an
amusing par.ody on Tipperary, which begins :
Up to rheumy Zurich town came an Irishman one day,
And as the place was rather dull he thought he'd give a play
So that the German propagandists might be rightly riled,
But the bully British Philistine once more drove Oscar Wilde.
And which ends:
For the C.G.'s not literary and his handymen are rogues.
For the C.G.'s about as literary as an I rish kish of brogues.
We paid all expenses, as the good Swiss public knows,
But we'll be damned well damned before we pay for Private
C's trunk hose.
205
 JAME S JOYCE
· Another of Joyce's compositions in this genre,
but in no way connected with the dispute, was
Mr. Dooley. It expressed the point of view of the
badgered yet optimistic individualist living through
war, revolution and commercial depression. The
final lines give the spirit of the whole poem:
Who will release us from jingo Jesus
Prays Mr. Dooleyooleyooley oo.
 CHAPTER TEN
UNLIKE The Cyclops episode, in which politics
dominated and, appropriately, no woman ap­
peared, Nausikaa leaves the government of the city
to whom it may concern and deals with the way of
a man with a maid, more particularly the way of
a middle-ageing married man with a maid. The
social problem set by this relation of man and
woman of different ages is raised by implication.
The mystery of women's clothing and the lures of
exhibitionism arise for consideration. The crime of
Onan is suggested and the question arises whether in
our present social organisation the statute of
limitations might not apply. Aesthetically con­
sidered Nausikaa is more purely sensibility than any
other episode in Ulysses. Sense organs, the eye and
the nose, are the presiding organs of the human
body: principally, however, the eye, for this is the
painters' episode. The scene is on the seashore, the
action begins at about eight o'clock, the light is a
rich and magical twilight.
Joyce is as little critical of the materials set before
him by society as is the landscape painter of the
material set before him by nature and man, but his
work is, nevertheless, because of its candour and
accuracy, a social document as the painting of
seventeenth century Dutch painters and of, say,
Canaletto, is a social document. Nausikaa shows us
(we knew it all along, of course) that those social
forces which, at a recent date, endowed the world
with the institutions of private property and mono-
207
 JAMES JOYCE
gamic marriage have not yet taught the wayward
eye of man not to rove. The chemistry of his body
and the imagination of his mind are older and
newer than his laws and conventions. The eye of
Mr. Bloom roves freely throughout the day and his
desires are provoked by many women, yet, on the
whole, the institution of marriage is triumphantly
vindicated in his person. To his wife, who since a
little past four o'clock that afternoon, has been
studying her concert programme with the aid of her
organiser, Blazes Boylan, his memories, desires and
hopes constantly return. Leopold's wife is something
more to him than his sexual complement. She is his
destiny, like the weight of his body, the shape of his
nose, his family, race and fortunes.
It has been a fine but, for Bloom, rather tiring
day. He is dressed in black and is wearing a bowler
hat, not an ideal garb for hot weather. He has
walked a lot on the hot stones of Dublin streets, is
very nervy about affairs at home, has recently been
engaged in an exhausting argument, and now with a
headache is down on the seashore for a breath of
fresh air. We are to suppose that there is a gap of
time between his hurried exit from Barney Kier­
nan's licensed premises and his appearance on
Sandymount shore, which time has been occupied
with a visit in the company of Martin Cunningham
to the Dignam family at their home in Sandymount.
This visit to the widow and orphans was no pleasure
to Bloom and he does not pretend that it was.
Three girls see him as he comes to rest on a rock not
far from them. The girls are Cissy Caffrey, Edy
Boardman and Gerty MacDowell, and they are
there with baby Boardman and Tommy and Jacky
Caffrey, twins, to have a "cosy chat beside the
sparkling waves and discuss matters feminine."
Of the three girls Gerty MacDowell is the star. She
208
 JAMES JOYCE

is described in the familiar novelette style of the

period, and we must remember that Poppy's Paper
and Florrie' s Paper, with their yarns about typists and
factory hands who get off with the young governor
in his sports Bentley, had not yet, in 1904, sup­
planted the Bow Bells and Heartsease novelettes,
where the young governess makes the crowded ball­
room floor gasp with her beauty, dressed in a
simple white frock and wearing a single white rose.
Carefully listening we can hear undertones of
Gerty's own Sandymount outlook and dialect in the
rich prose of the Heartsease library.
"The waxen pallor of her face was almost
spiritual in its ivorylike purity though her rosebud
mouth was a genuine Cupid's bow, Greekly per­
fect. Her hands were of finely veined alabaster with
tapering fingers and as white as lemon juice and
queen of ointments could make them though it was
not true that she used to wear kid gloves in bed or
take a milk footbath either. . . . Why have women
such eyes of witchery? Gerty's were of the bluest
Irish blue, set off by lustrous lashes and dark
expressive brows. . . . But Gerty's crowning glory
was her wealth of wonderful hair. It was dark
brown with a natural wave in it. She had cut it
that very morning on account of the new moon and
it nestled about her pretty head in a profusion of
luxuriant clusters and pared her nails too. . . .
Gerty was dreiised simply but with the instinctive
taste of a votary of Dame Fashion for she felt that
there was just a might that he might be out. A neat
blouse of electric blue, self-tinted by dolly dyes
(because it was expected in the Lady's Pictorial that
electric blue would be worn), with a smart vee
opening down to the division and kerchief pocket
(in which she always kept a piece of cottonwool
scented with her favourite perfume because the
209
 J A ME S JOYCE
handkerchief spoiled the sit) and a navy three­
quarter skirt cut to the stride showed off her slim
graceful figure to perfection. She wore a coquettish
little love of a hat of wideleaved nigger straw contrast
trimmed with an underbrim of egg-blue chenille and
at the side a butterfly bow to tone. . . . "
Gerty is granddaughter to Mr. Giltrap, whose
wolfhound, Garryowen, supplies local colour to the
Citizen on his propagandist pubcrawls. The heart
of the virgin leaps to the tinkle of the bicycle bell of
the boy down the street ( and Gerty MacDowell
loves Reggie Wylie, the boy with the bicycle bell)
but it yearns for the handsome, unknown stranger
of its dreams. And the heart of the handsome, dark
stranger (known to us, unknown to Gerty, for it is
Bloom) responds with desire for her youth, as nothing
more fervently desires youth than the heart of
middle-ageing man, conscious that its beats are
numbered. The desires of both are favoured by the
warmth and half darkness of the June evening.
Bloom's watch stopped at half-past four, signifi­
cant hour, but when Cissy Caffrey asks him the
time he knows it is after eight because the sun has
set. From afar they hear the litany of Our Lady of
Loreto, "Refuge of sinners. Comfortress of the
afflicted," being sung in the church, Star of the Sea.
The devotion in progress is the men's temperance
retreat, rosary, sermon and benediction of the Most
Blessed Sacrament. Gerty pictures to herself the
scene in the church, "the stained glass windows
lighted up, the candles, flowers and the blue
banners of the Blessed Virgin's sociality." This is an
aspect of Catholic Christian worship that seemed to
Joyce peculiarly appropriate in an episode the main
theme of which is sex appeal. In a letter to me from
Trieste he wrote: "Nausikaa is written in a namby­
pamby jammy marmalady drawersy (alto la !) style
2W
 JAME S JOYCE
with effects of incense, mariolatry, masturbation,
stewed cockles, painter's palette, chitchat, circumlo­
cution, etc. etc." We may take it that Stephen is
expressing Joyce's own mature view when, in
expounding his Hamlet theory, he says : "Father­
hood, in the sense of conscious begetting, is unknown
to man. It is a mystical estate, an apostolic suc­
cession, from only begetter to only begotten. On
that mystery and not on the Madonna which the
cunning Italian intellect flung to the mob of Europe
the Church is founded and founded irremovably
b ecause founded, like the world, macro- and
nucrocosm, upon the void." It goes almost without
saying that Gerty agrees thoroughly with the im­
mediate social object of the mission because: "Had
her father only avoided the clutches of the demon
drink, by taking the pledge or those powders the
drink habit cured in Pearso n's Weekry, she might now
be rolling in her carriage, second to none. Over and
over had she told herself that as she mused by the
dying embers in a brown study without the lamp
because she hated two lights or oftentimes gazing
out of the window dreamily by the hour at the rain
falling on the rusty bucket, thinking. But that vile
decoction which has ruined so many hearths and
homes had cast its shadow over her childhood
days. . . . " And now Gerty has got the vote and
unless she takes to porter or cocktails herself we
shall see.
The dusk deepens and a bat flies through the air
around them "with a tiny lost cry." At the Mirus
bazaar in aid of funds for Mercer's Hospital a fire­
work display begins, "And they all ran down the
strand to see over the houses and the church, helter­
skelter, Edy with the push-car with baby Boardman
in it and Cissy holding Tommy and Jacky by the
hand so they wouldn't fall running." The two girls
2lI
 JAM E S JOY C E

call to Gerty to follow them, but Gerty prefers to

remain where she is, sitting on a rock. She can see
just as well from that point and she is glad they are
going for it leaves her alone in the gathering dark­
ness with the dark, handsome stranger, who, from
his position, leaning against a nearby rock, is
devouring her with his eyes. They are letting off
Roman candles and Gerty leans back as far as
possible to see the display, one uplifted knee clasped
with both hands. One strange thing about the
light of after sundown is that all white things look
mysteriously and dominatingly white in a land­
scape in which half tones have begun to merge into
a predominating dark. "And she saw a long
Roman candle going up over the trees up, up,
and, in the tense hush, they were all breathless
with excitement as it went higher and higher and
she had to lean back more and more to look up
after it, high, high, almost out of sight, and her face
was suffused with a divine, an entrancing blush
from straining back and he could see her other -
things, too, nainsook knickers, the fabric that
caresses the skin, better than those other pettiwidth,
the green, four and eleven. . . . "
The female form divine, undraped, is a sight for
gods, artists, philosophers, physicians and suchlike.
It is a majestic object, sometimes awe-inspiring,
sometimes pitiful and, but rarely, and to some few,
erotically provoking. It is made more alluring and
approachable when its majestic beauties and stark
realities are appropriately veiled. It is easy to
believe the nudists when they daim that nudist
colonies are haunts of austere purity. Erudite French
writers have maintained that the garments so
attractive to Bloom were of Greek origin-that the
Greeks had a word for them-that after centuries of
eclipse they came back again in the seventeenth
212
 J AMES JOY CE
century, that during the eighteenth century they
again went out of sight and mind, only to reach the
point of highest culture at about thee time of Zola
and Mr. Bloom. Modesty, it is said, was the cause of
this development, modest forethought for possible
falls from horses and, later on, from bicycles. Then
it was also a precaution against masculine invasive­
ness. Climate also played a part and, in generations
when a belief in microbes was prevalent, hygiene.
But none of these solid historical reasons seems to
explain satisfactorily how colour, form and fabric
combined to provide the female sex with such a
remarkable instrument of coquetterie.
Change in the concealings and revealings of
coquettish allurements seems, as in all other matters,
to be the only constant thing about it. That the
female form must be veiled is on all sides, excepting
nudist colonies, admitted, but not always with the
same chiffon, for the imagination of man is lazy and
that of the dress designer and tailor active. He is
served with a constant novelty of provocation, if he
demands it or not. The question whether the tempo
of these changes of fashion is conditioned by the
tempo of social transformation as a whole is one
that the historian of costume must answer (Chapter:
Figleaf to Mulberry leaf and beyond). But, so
headlong has been the rate of change in the last
quarter of a century that if Gerty MacDowell's
undies so attractive to Bloom, were displayed (J
titre de dot:umentation historique) in a Regent Street
shop window they would provoke, but only to
laughter. And the loudest and longest laugh
would be that of Gerty MacDowell herself, passing
the window with her streamlined, grown up
daughter. Could D.::.n Leno now say, "Red or
White, Madam?" without mystifying nine-tenths of
his audience? The easiest film laugh available is got
213
 JAMES JOYCE

by showing a bedroom of that epoch, when the great

white Queen Victoria ruled these islands, with a
lady in it, draped in the voluminous undergarments
of the period. The next easiest laugh is got by
showing a ten years pre-war motor car. For all its
pruderies of speech and manner the period of
Bloom's youth and manhood was erotic to a tropical
degree. Let anyone behold the ladies' underwear in
artificial silk in all colours but the right one exhibited
nowadays in shop windows everywhere and admit
that they are woefully unerotic. They are a visible
sign that the tide is now setting in the direction of
candour, co-education and companionate marriages
with surgically clean, scientific instruction in erotic
and contraceptive mysteries, classic treatises on
which will, no doubt, soon be borne home with the
latest vitamin cookery book as school prizes. But
when the life force, if that most depressing divinity
happens to be in fashion at the time, finds that
tabulated knowledge, the good pal girl and the
fifty-fifty boy lead only to tweeds for everybody and
general indifference, then social and sexual taboos,
ignorance, inhibitions, white undies, black stockings,
and furtiveness, will come in again with all their
tensions, as in the days of Gerty MacDowell. ·
What is the usual result of mutual erotic attrac­
tion between the middle-aged, married man and the
young virgin? There is a gap of time and experience,
not to mention social convenience, between the
grisonnant and the grisette not easily bridged except
by some variation, more or less involved, of the
expeditious practice of Bloom. The consideration of
expediency dominates. One gathers that children in
the days of Judah were a form of social riches and ·
that Judah's son objected to increasing his brother's
store, just as he might have refused to bear a hand
with the ploughing and sowing in his brother's field.
2 14
 J A M E.S JOYCE

Onan was condemned not for a contraceptual

practice as such, but for a lack of tribal solidarity,
of brotherly love. His excessive individualism was
punished. It is as if he had hoarded or wasted
national property in time of war or famine. The
only thought in Bloom's subsequent monologue
that at all bears on this aspect of the question is :
"Glad to get away from other chap's wife. Eating
off his cold plate." But this is a purely aesthetic or
hygienic motive and has nothing to do with social
and religious considerations.
Bloom is a married man, a father, and is twenty
years the senior of Gerty, the maid. A solution to
the problem of their mutual attraction that leaves
nobody a penny the worse off cannot be considered
entirely unsuccessful. Had Bloom spoken to Gerty,
immediate disillusionment might have followed.
What seemed so attractive at ten yards might, at
arm's length, have lef t indifferent, in which case
mutual embarrassment would have put an end to
the matter. But if at the first "Good evening" the
attraction had increased, and an affair had started,
Gerty would have written letters and started a
rivalry with his wife just as, to Bloom's annoyance,
Martha Clifford has begun to do. Bloom himself
reflects: "Suppose I spoke to her. What about?
Bad plan however if you don't know how to end the
conversation. Ask them a question and they ask you
another." And again: "Might have made a worse
fool of myself. . . lnstead of talking about nothing."
It is easy for a rich man, who has energy as well
as money to burn, to keep separate establishments
for a vanety of loves. But Bloom is a poor man. He
has work to do and a family to keep. He is, besides,
a prudent man and, although open to a variety of
sexual excitations, is not a passionate man in the
sense that he could ever allow the integrity of his
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 JAMES JOYCE
life to be endangered by any one object. Whatever
the charms of other women he accepts them as
adjuncts to, not as rivals of, his wife. And Marian's
fixed empire over his mind is not shaken by his
knowledge that she is possessed by other men. In
fact, thinking of Boylan's visit to Marion, he even
calmly considers whether her lover ought not to pay
for the privilege of her love : "Suppose he gave her
money. Why not? All a prejudice. She's worth ten,
fifteen, more a pound. What? I think so. All that
for nothing." After the fall of the greeny, dewy stars
of the Roman candle, and Bloom's expense of spirit,
Gerty rises and follows her two friends away from
the seashore, waving to them as she does so the
piece of scented cotton wool she carries in her
kerchief pocket. It is one of "love's little ruses." The
signal is for them but the sweet scent is for her dark,
stranger lover. Then the style of the episode changes
from the marmalady circumlocutions ofthe novelette
to the hacked phrases of Bloom's thoughts.
.Nausikaa is the one pictorial episode in Ulysses. It
is pre-eminently the episode of sensibility in both
the emotional and physical sense. Sight is the sense
most in evidence, but nose, ear and touch reinforce
the true organ of vision. A picture of the seashore is
built up in the novelettish narrative of the seductive
Gerty, and that picture becomes rarer and denser
in the tightly woven texture of Bloom's unspoken
thoughts. It must be regarded as something of a
wonder that the seen thing should play the great
part it does play in the writing of a man whose sight
was never strong. But the many things in Ulysses
vividly seen are generally closeups. They are
vehemently drawn, sometimes photographed as
with a stereoscopic camera, but not painted. Space,
air and a diminishing force of sight towards the
periphery of the field of vision are lacking. If there
216
 J AM E S JO Y C E
is a parallel in the art of painting for Joyce's swift,
instantaneous shots of life it is in the art of Matisse,
or, when Joyce's vision is graphic rather thfln
pictorial, the art of the draughtsman, Rodin,
watching, ready pencil in hand, the model doing
whatever it pleased in his studio. For example:
"An elderly man shot up near the spur of rock a
blowing red face. He scrambled up by the stones,
water glistening on his pate and on its garland of
grey hair, water rilling over his chest and paunch
and spilling jets out of his black sagging loincloth."
"Broken hoops on the shore, at the land a maze of
dark, cunning nets ; farther away chalkscrawled
back doors and on the higher beach a drying line
with two crucified shirts."
"Kind air defined the coigns of houses in Kildare
Street. No birds. Frail from the housetops two
plumes of smoke ascended, pluming, and in a flaw
of softness softly were blown."
"Do you see the tide flowing quickly in on all
sides, sheeting the lows of sands quickly, shellcocoa­
coloured?"
The same for the human mannerism, a gesture
caught quickly with the model on the move:
"Haines detached from his underlip some fibres
of tobacco before he spoke."
"He took off his silk hat and, blowing out
impatiently his bushy moustache, welshcombed his
hair with raking fingers."
"He removed his large Henry Clay decisively and
his large fierce eyes scowled intelligently over all
their faces."
"His hands moulded ample curves of air. He shut
his eyes tight in delight, his body shrinking, and
blew a sweet chirp from his lips."
It may be because these things form part of the
momentary life of the person or persons present that
217
 J AME S J OYC E
they seem to be instantaneously photographed or
drawn with the object on the move. They are not
presented as something outside, but as something
inside, the acting personage. Some conversations
ring so true that they might have been caught up
from actual life by a sound-recording instrument.
The mystery here is, how Joyce, through twenty
years of exile, could preserve with such freshness the
tones and mannerisms of his fellow citizens. Take,
for example, the conversation-incredulous expostu­
lation and confident affirmation-between Joe
Hynes and Alf Bergan on the subject of Dignam
appearing in the street with Willie Murray after his
funeral. This is the same vividness and directness
that drew upon: Rodin the charge of lifting from
nature by means of a plaster cast. And then there are
Joyce's imitations with vowel and consonant of
natural and mechanical sounds-those of the sea
flowing over weed and rocks, those of the machines
in the Telegraph office, those of the fireworks heard
from Sandymount Beach.
.Nausikaa is essentially pictorial, not because of
any pictorial descriptions (there are very few), but
because we are always made to feel conscious of the
ambient of air around Bloom, Gerty and her
friends. The surroundings of the persons, the
beach, the town, the sky with clouds and fireworks,
the sea and its crawling surf, Howth Head rising up
out of the sea, everything, moving or stationary,
affirms the idea of space. All the colour is enveloped
in air. Here, too, is realised a landscape, fore­
shadowing, in conception though not in material,
those mysterious dream glimpses of landscape in
Wo rk in Pro gress, where the earth comes to life and
shares consciousness with its creatures. It occurs
in a space of no thoughts while Bloom is still
standing on the seashore.
2 18
 JAM ES J OYC E
"A lost long candle wandered up the sky from
Mirus bazaar in search of funds for Mercer's
hospital and broke, drooping, and shed a cluster of
violet but one white stars. They floated, fell: they
faded. The shepherd's hour: the hour of holding:
hour of tryst. From house to house, giving his ever­
welcome double knock, went the nine o'clock post­
man, the glowworm's lamp at his belt gleaming here
and there through the laurel hedges. And among
the five young trees a hoisted lintstock lit the lamp
at Leahy's terrace . . . . Twittering the bat flew
here, flew there. Far out over the sands the coming
surf crept, grey. Howth settled for slumber tired of
long days, of yumyum rhododendrons (he was old)
and felt gladly the night breeze lift, ruffle his fell of
ferns. He lay but opened a red eye unsleeping, deep
and slowly breathing, slumberous but awake. And
far on Kish bank the anchored lightship twinkled,
winked at Mr. Bloom."
Sound aids the illusion of space, the hiss and
splutter of fireworks, the voices of the girls and
children and of the worshippers in the Star of the
Sea Church. Smell, too: for Gerty MacDowell's
farewell to Bloom is waved with scented wadding
acro�s the space that divides them. And movement,
in the shape of the receding figures of Gerty, her
friends, the twins and the bassinette, of the hither
and thither fluttering bat, of the clouds and the on­
creeping surf, intensifies the pictorial lyricism. It is
a Whistler theme, painted with the greater elegance
and liveliness of a Fragonard. It is a stern talc of
Swift swiftly told by Sterne. Joyce always held that
these two writers ought to change names.
Some of Bloom's thoughts may disconcert, but
they will ring true enough for all who have not too
well learned the art of forgetting. They are the
thoughts of a man who chooses his deeds carefully
219
 JAMES JOYCE

from among them. Bloom's mood, when he is left

alone, is one of attention, dispassionate observation,
and finally, as he walks slowly citywards, of trance­
like relaxation. Standing still for · a moment he
closes his eyes and his thought becomes a kaleidos­
cope of remembered sensations. Then he pulls
himself together and goes on. It is too late to go to
the performance of Leah as he had intended. He will
call instead at the lying-in hospital for news of Mina
Purefoy. The cuckoo clock in the study of Father
,Conroy and Carton O'Hanlon sings nine as he re­
enters the streets of Dublin.
Begun i'.n Zurich, Nausikaa was completed in
Trieste. Following Nausikaa comes The Oxen of the
Sun, which was not completed till just before Joyce
left Trieste for Paris. It was rare that Joyce spoke of
a part of his book on which he was not working, but
one day in Ziirich, as we were walking by the
Limmat, he said to me:
"What do you make of the story of the Oxen of
the Sun?"
"How make of it?" I said. "It's the :,,tory of a
fabulous happening to me. That's all."
"Not to me," said Joyce. "The companions of
Ulysses di�obey the commands of Pallas. They slay
and flay the oxen of the Sungod and all are drowned
save the prudent and pious Ulysses. I interpret the
killing of the sacred oxen as the crime against
fecundity by sterilising the act of coition. And I
think my interpretation is as sound as that of any
other commentator on Homer."
From the fresh air and vast open spaces of the
seashore we enter a den where medical students and
others are foregathered for drink and talk. The
young men are drinking Bass's No. I , which is a
most potent mead, and their loud, coarse talk
drowns, except for instants, the cries of women in
2 20
 JAMES JOYCE
travail. For they are in the lying-in hospital in
Bolles Street, conducted by Dr. Andrew Horne.
Bloom, on leaving Sandymount Shore, calls to
enquire after the progress of Mrs. Purefoy, who has
been three days in labour. While standing, hat in
hand, talking to the nurse in the vestibule, he is
hailed by the young house surgeon, Dixon, who
attended him for a wasp sting some time before.
He demurs at first to Dixon\, invitation to join
them, but only to keep the good opinion of the
nurse, who find::. all this merriment and insobriety
unseemly, eventually, however, yields to the doctor's
per::.uasion and joins the young drinkers of ale.
After the ::.weet air and ::.ubtle sounds of Sandy­
mount Beach, the reek of beer and tobacco and the
clamour of men's voice::, ! After the phy::.ical space of
the seashore, the ::.paceless labyrinth of the human
comcience and the physical space of the womb !
The Oxen of the Sun is, with the exception, perhaps,
of Ithaca, more symbolical than any episode in the
book. The chaste, faithful nurse is the ovum .
Bloom, the vital principle, i:. the spermatozoon.
Stephen, the growing and expanding soul, is the
embryo > and all are contained within the womb for
which the maternity hospital of Dr. Horne is
symbol.
All Bloom's companions are young, unmarried
men. He is married and the father of two children.
They, who are neither chaste nor parents, are the
slayers of the sacred animals, for they enjoy the
plea::.ures of love, but by all means at their disposal
prevent its fruitfulness. By their luxury and
indulgence possible souls and bodies are denied the
entry into life and experience. Outwardly the
young men are bright and happy lives. It is in the
mind and conscience of Bloom and Stephen that
their crime and conflict are acknowledged and
22 1
 JAMES JO Y C E
resolved. Bloom hears, as his race heard in the
past, the command to increase and multiply, and
Stephen hears the same voice through the Holy
Roman Catholic Apo5tolic Church. Their com­
panions have sworn allegiance to the newer gods
of Malthus and the eugenic societies. Bloom is
conscious of many acts of disobedience against the
command of his racial god, including one most
recent, but the vision of his wife and two children
comes to his defence. He has to that extent obeyed
the law and can absolve himself from guilt. Even
while they are sitting in the 5tudents' room in front
of their beer, bread and sardines, the voice of the
god is heard outside-a noise in the. street. , It is the
Thunder God, who, according to Vico, drove with
his terrifying voice and fierce lightnings ::.hameless
primitive people to hide their fornications in caves
and to begin civilised life. Stephen is afraid of
thunder. He no more believes in the skygod than
in Christ's salvation, but he is afraid of them both.
The others are too drunk to care. With plausible
speech Bloom assures them all, and Stephen in
particular, that they need not be afraid, for the noise
and fire are to be explained by cause and effect. It is
not a god who is speaking, but the blind forces of
nature-not divinity, but phenomenon. He believes
in no god-neither in his own tribal god nor in the
deities of the stranger. Everything is explicable. If
there is some phenomenon of which we cannot to­
day explain the natural order we shall be able to
explain it to-morrow ..
Men drinking ale and women bearing children:
there is reason inJoyce's bringing the5e two phases of
life together under the same roof. Each sex is about
its most specialised function. One is producing
bodies and the other making societies. Sitting
together before ale or wine, or whatever the country
2 22
 JAMES JOYCE

affords, was ever one of the most serious and useful

activities of men. It was not alone through mead
that societies came into being, but fermented drinks
were among the greatest of civilising agencies as all
religions and legends testify. So important were
they that they were deemed to be of divine origin.
There were Bacchus and the other corn and wine
gods, whilst Christ turned water into wine. And
there was Odin, too, for we read in the Edda, "Gere
and Freke, sates the warfaring, father of hosts,
everyday with Saerimnher, but Odin himself, the
renowned in arms, lives upon wine alone." When
vain dwarfs misused, and stupid giants locked
away, poetic inspiration in the form of the Gold
Mead the god himself became wanderer, labourer,
inventor, worm, lover and eagle to win it back for
the right use of gods and men. Where once woman,
in a fatal alliance with the petrol engine, laid a
violent hand on the winecup instead of a gentle
restraining hand upon the arm that raised it, the
evil spirits of hooch and anarchy raised their heads
and dire waste and ruin were the result.
The style has changed with the mood and
motive. The novelette style of Gerty MacDowell and
the truncated �entences of Bloom's unspoken
thoughtl) have given place to a parade of costume
styles, resembling an historical pageant. After a
short opening, suggestive of conception and birth,
the episode is introduced with what Joyce called, in
a letter to me, "a Sallustian-Tacitean prelude (the
unfertilised ovum) ." From that the action pro­
ceeds through nine parts, but without divisions, to
the birth of Mrs. Purefoy's child. From alliterative,
monosyllabic, early English the prose passes in
chronological sequence through progressive styles
of literary English and ends, as all the festive youth
rush from Home's house to Burke's pub, in the no
223
 J AMES J O YCE

style at all, slang of half-drunken human utterance­

pidgin English, Nigger English, Cockney, Irish,
Scots, Welsh, Bowery slang and broken doggerel­
a torrent of living, and therefore, except to those
present, half-incomprehensible speech.
Through these progressive changes of language
the development of the embryo and faunal evolution
in general are shown, and throughout the episode
we are subtly and constantly reminded of the events
of the day. A double thudding Anglo-Saxon motive
continually recurs to give the feeling of trampling
oxen. "Woman's woe with wonder pondering."
"Ruth red him, love led on with will to wander,
lath to leave." "In Horne's nouse rest should
reign." "With will will we withstand, withsay."
The action begins with Bloom's arrival at the
hospital door. "Some man that wayfaring was
stood by house door at night's oncoming." "In
ward wary the watcher hearing come that man
mildhearted eft rising with swire ywimpled to him
her gate wide undid." Bloom had seen storm­
clouds gathering and now the storm breaks as the
nurse opens the door. "Christ's rood made she on
breastbone and him drew that he would rathe
infare under her thatch." Dixon crosses the hall
and invites Bloom to join them in the manner of
Mandeville. "And the traveller Leopold went into
the castle for to rest him for a space being sore of
limb after many march.es environing in divers lands
and sometimes venery." The persons to whom the
able and plausible Dixon leads him are Stephen,
Lynch, Madden, Lenehan, Crotthers and Punch
Costello. Malachi Mulligan is expected and later on
arrives with Bannon of Mullingar, who has started
a flirtation with Millicent Bloom. Lynch one sup­
poses an able young man, but in character he is
embittered and envious. He is the eater of dried
224
 JAMES JOYCE
cowdung who listens to Stephen's aesthetic theories
in A Portrait of the Artist. Madden is a medical
student with frequent fits of piety. Crotthers is a
Scot. Lenehan we know is tipster of the loser for the
Ascot Gold Cup, and Punch Costello is a Rowland­
son-like caricature of a coarse, drunken bully. One
sees them all as they sit, stand and move. In the
thick, smoky atmosphere they are like chocolate­
coloured fish swimming in a cobalt aquarium.
Bloom is here shown as a staunch defender of
womanhood. He is always susceptible to women's
phyi,ical charms, but in this house of birth he is
particularly sympathetic to their woes. His com­
monsense is proof against the mysteries of religions.
The mysterious destiny, however, that lays upon
one half of the human race the pain of child-birth
is one before which he bows. When Lenehan pours
him out a drink he takes it and drinks to his com­
panions' health, but while all are drinking as much
as they can he drinks as little as possible. And this
is not entirely the defensive attitude of the prudent
member. It is because he feels that too much drink
and noise in a house of birth is inhuman and un­
seemly. Another reason for his abstemiousness is
that he sees that Stephen is getting drunk. He feels
drawn towards Stephen, whom he has seen already
three times that day. His thoughts of his own dead
son are given in Morte d'Arthur style. ". . . and
now sir Leopold that had of his body no manchild
for an heir looked upon him his friend's son and
was shut up in sorrow for his forepast happiness and
as sad as he was that him failed a son of such gentle
courage (for all accounted him of real parts) so
grieved he also in no less measure for young
Stephen for that he lived riotously with those
wastrels and murdered his goods with whores."
Then follows a passage in the Elizabethan
225
 JAMES JOYCE

chronicle style-"About that present time young

Stephen filled all cups" and so on through Milton,
Taylor, Hooker, Browne--all conveying the con­
tempt of death and birth felt by young men living
on a full tide of life and for that moment in which
they live. Thunder is heard without and Stephen is
afraid, but Bloom, to comfort him, points out that it
is nothing but an electrical phenomenon. Stephen
is not comforted and his pain of conscience is
described in the manner of Bunyan:
"Yes, Pious had told him of that land and Chaste
had pointed him to the way but the reason was
that in the way he fell in with a certain whore of an
eyeplea5ing exterior whose name, she said, is Bird­
in-the-Hand and she beguiled him wrongways from
the true path by her flatteries that she said to him as,
Ho, you pretty man, turn a�ide hither and I will
show you a brave place, and she lay at him so
flatteringly that she had him in her grot which is
named Two-in-the-Bush or, by some learned,
Carnal Concupiscence." Bird-in-the-Hand is greatly
desired by all present and, "for that foul plague
Allpox and the monsters they cared not for them,
for Preservative had given them a stout shield of
oxengut and, third, that they might take no hurt
neither from Offspring that was that wicked devil by
virtue of this same shield which was named Kill­
child. "
Stephen mentions Mr. Deasy's letter on the foot
and mouth disease, and this leads to a discussion on
the reformation and the founding of the Anglican
Church in the style of Swift. Mulligan appears with
Alec Bannon, both wetted by the storm. The
agreeable and witty Buck adds to the gaiety by un­
folding a plan to set up a human stud-farm on
Lambay Island, himself to be principal sire. The
ribald conversation, in which Bloom takes no part,
226
 JAMES JOYCE
proceeds in the manner of Steele, Addison and
Sterne, until Bloom's sober air of superiority is
rebuked in the crushing prose of Junius. Then
Haines appears, in a blue light out of the castle of
Otranto, but only for a moment to fix a meeting
with Mulligan at Westland Row Station at half­
past eleven. Unwillmg to take part in the wild talk
of the others, Bloom . turns inwards to his own
memories, his schooldays, his first bowler hat, his
first efforts as a traveller in cheap jewellery, his
parents' home at evening time, then of his first love
(it was Bridie Kelly in Hatch Street) and finally of
hi� present state without a son and heir. So far the
coyly familiar Lamb. Then De Quincey supplies the
colour, accent and cadences for his vision of his wife
and daughter seen as mare and filly foal. The
vision fades and in its place come innumerable
might-have-beens of his virility in the shape of a
ghostly company of bea�ts :
"Elk and yak, the bulls of Bashan and of Babylon,
mammoth and mastodon, they come trooping to the
sunken sea, Lacus Mortis. Ominous, revengeful,
zodiacal hosts ! They moan, passing upon · the
clouds, horned and capricorned, the trumpeted
with the tusked, the lionmaned the giantantlered,
snouter and crawler, rodent, ruminant and pachy­
derm, all their moving, moaning multitude,
murderer� of the sun."
The others are speaking of the Gold Cup and
regretting the downfall of Bass's mare, Sceptre.
Bloom's dream arises while he is gazing fixedly at
the well-known triangular sign on a bottle of
Bass's No. 1 . The gallant mare and her owner's
sign coalesce, and through this transformation the
vision of his female household triumphs over the
regrets of a past wasteful of its seed. The "equine
portent grows again" and �ilences the grievous
227
 JAMES JOYCE
shrieks of murdered oxen. It fills the sky of his
dreams and comes to rest over the house of Virgo.
The hope of earthly continuity that in him springs
anew centres in his daughter, Millicent, with whom
in confused amorousness he associates Martha, his
secret love. From the one he may beget children
and on the other children of his race and line may
be begotten. Lenehan wants to drown his sorrows
in more Bass and makes to seize the bottle, but
M ulligan, whose watchful eye has observed Bloom's
reverie, restrains him. "Warily, Malachi whispered,
preserve a druid silence. His soul is far away. It is
as painful perhaps to be awakened from a vision as
to be born."
The prose lifts to Pater and Ruskin, degenerates
into the prose of vulgarised science, and in a
clammy morsel, resembling Dickens, we are told
that Mina Purefoy has born a manchild. The
provender of beer has given out. Closing time is
approaching. Stephen shouts, "Burke's." All the
drunk or half-drunk company rush for the door.
Only Bloom and Dixon, the one for professional and
the other for humane reasons, remain behind. The
voice of Carlyle blesses the newborn babe and the
ageing but still productive parents. At Burke's,
where Stephen stands all the drinks-three rounds­
Alec Bannon recognises Bloom as the father of the
little girl in the photoshop. "Photo's papli, by all
that's gorgeous." Drunk as he is, Stephen is still
resolved not to return to the tower of which he has
given Mulligan the key. When they are eventually
flung out of Burke's one of the party sees the
announcement of Dr. A. J. Christ Dowie's mission
on a hoarding opposite and the episode concludes in
a vein of ultra-Protestant American righteousness
and with the authentic voice of Dowie him:;,elf.
"Come on, you triple extract of infamy! Alex-
228
 JAMES JOY C E
ander J. Christ Dowie, that's yanked to glory most
half this planet from Frisco Beach to Vladivostok.
The Deity ain't no nickle dime b umshow. I put it
to you that he's on the i,quare and a corking fine
busine!.!. proposition. He's the grande!.t thing yet
and don't you forget it. Shout salvation in King
Jesus. You'll need to rise precious early, you
sinner there, if you want to diddle the Almighty
God. Pflaaaap! Not half. He's got a cough­
mixture with a punch in it for you, my friend, in
his back-pocket. Just you try it on."
The bark of Ulysses Bloom's companions founders
under the curse of the Sky God. Bloom is safe, but
is as a seaman who takes his discharge from a ship
and a week later reads that she has gone down with
all hands. Should he thank providence for his
escape? Pity his companions? Feel flattered by a
special destiny? He doesn't know. I didn't know
myself what to think when I read that the Eleano r
Tho mas had gone down with all hands on the
St. Nicholas bank.

229
 CHAPTER ELEVEN
JoYcE's stay in Trieste in 1 920 was not a happy one.
The Habsburg Empire no longer existed and Trieste
had changed hands. With all its faults the old dual
monarchy was a political roof over the heads of
many peoples and even a leaky roof is better than a
continual moving job. "If only the war would
come to an. end," said everybody while the war was
on, but when it ended everybody found how
horrible peace could be. The world was full of
housing, currency, unemployment, tramport and
frontier problems. The bills to be met appalled
everybody and the shareout satisfied nobody. This
was everywhere the case but there was in addition
an administrative change-over in progress in Trieste.
Apart from the climate of the Adriatic port, which
I understand suited him admirably, Joyce worked
under a greater handicap in Trieste than in Zurich.
This, however, had no effect on his rate of pro­
duction. Two episodes, Nausikaa and The Oxen of
the Sun, were completed during Joyce's six months'
stay in Trieste. In several letters Joyce invited me
to visit him there, but I had made up my mind to
return to England at the earliest opportunity, and to
make both journeys seemed to me to be impractic­
able. Fortunately, August Suter was able to give me
employment in his studio in Zollikon. This work,
with the addition of an intensive effort in the selling
of pictures, enabled me to earn enough money to
cover the cost ofmy journey with something in hand
for a start in London. August Suter thought that
going back to London was a crazy project.
230
 J A MES J O YC E
"If you won't go to Trieste," said Suter, "go to
Rome. There's no seme in re.turning to England.
It's mere sentimentality."
But the lure of the Caledonian Road was too
strong. In August 1 920 I left Zurich for England.
By that time Joyce had already left Trieste for the
more congenial atmosphere of Paris. All home­
comings are disappointments. Mine wai,. I found
my&elfhating post-war London and I communicated
my f>entimentf> to Joyce, who, in a letter of December
1 920; made the following comment: "A point about
Ulysses (Bloom). He romances about Ithaca (Oi
want teh gow beck teh the Mawl Enn Rowd, s'elp
me !) and when he gets back it gives him the pip. I
mention this because you in your absence from
England seemed to have forgotten the human
atmosphere and I the atmospheric conditions of
these zones."
On my way to England I stayed a week in Paris,
at a little hotel in Passy, near Joyce's flat in the rue
de I' Assomption. Joyce spoke with enthusiasm of
Paris.
"There is an atmosphere of spiritual effort here,"
he said. "No other city is quite like it. It is a race­
course tension. I wake early, often at five o'clock,
and start writing at once."
Since the month ofJune he had been working on
the Circe episode, the longest, the strangest and in
many ways the strongest episode of U(ysses. It is
steeped in the atmosphere and governed by the logic
of hallucination, but its dominant theme is the
fatherly love and care of Bloom for Stephen
Dedalus. Throughout the day, at the breakfast
table, in the mourners' coach, in Grafton Street, in
the Ormond Hotel, in the maternity hospital,
Bloom has been constantly haunted by thoughts of
his son, Rudy, dead eleven days old. Now the
23 1
 J AMES J O Y CE
fatherhood in him sees sonship in the person of
Stephen. In the words of Stephen, uttered some ten
hours earlier, "He was and felt himself the father of
all his race." Through all the changing laws and
forms of marriage motherhood was always a plain,
indisputable physical fact and fatherhood always a
social, a spiritual affirmation. Even under group
marriage the mother knew her own offspring, but
even under official monogamy that child, according
to popular wit, is wise who knows its own father. A
memory of the past may appear to be an ideal, and
an ideal may turn out to be a race memory. - English
revolutions, forward steps in time, always appealed
for their justification to a past lost in the mists of
legend, and the French Revolution garbed itself as
Brutus and Cassius, Harmodius and Aristogeiton.
The race memories and the aspirations of man are
one and indivisible. Utopian Bloom adopts
Stephen into the matriarchate where the male,
once admitted to the society of the female tribe,
becomes father of all its children jointly with all
other males. There are indications enough in his
own nineteenth century marriage of this more
primitive marriage state. From Marion's point of
view their union is a group organisation with the
added advantage that it has a single responsible
breadwinner. Her family, in the person of Major
Brian Cooper Tweedy, is ever present in Bloom's
memory but it seems that Marion pays no heed at
all to the poor old Hungarian Jew who died of
aconite poisoning ir the Queen's Hotel, Ennis, Co.
Clare, except to remember that he ruined himself.
Marion wishes she bore her mother's name instead
of her father's. Milly, too, their daughter, as soon
as she arrives at woman's estate, joins forces with her
mother, leaving Bloom in the household in a.
minority of one. That doubt of individual father•
232
 J AM E S J OYC E

hood and affirmation of universal fatherhood are

expressed in the fatherhood of God which, as
Stephen avers, is the basis of the Christian religion.
· In a simple and human way, without pose of
humanity or sublimation of his own loss, Bloom
follows Stephen and Lynch to Nighttown. Under
this designation the English reader has to figure
to himself a part of north-east Dublin where
Catholic tradition and police tolerance allowed
whole streets of houses to be used openly as brothels,
whores sitting on the doorsteps soliciting, as freely
as if they were in Marseilles. Illicit love was
allowed. What was not allowed was illicit :-lrinking.
"Shebeening" .was pursued with all the rigours of
the law. It is in this haunt of Dublin nightlife that
Bloom's individual and social fatherhood resolve
themselves into one when, as he mounts guard over
the prostrate form of Stephen, the vision of his own
begotten son, Rudy, passes before his eyes.
There was a scene of some sort on Westland Row
Railway Station and Stephen was one of the
principal actors in it. Perhaps Mulligan, who is
shown as having a vein of snobbery in his nature,
dodged away with Haines, deserting Stephen. The
key to the tower may have played a part in the
dispute, for it is a grievance with Stephen that
although he paid the rent Mulligan demanded the
key. With all his real grievances and constellated
discontents it is . possible that Stephen's schooled
reactions broke down under the influence of
absinthe. Whatever happened, the general dispersal
of the maternity hospital company leaves Stephen
with the envious and unreliable Lynch on the way
to the cheap brothels of Nighttown. In the mix up
on Westland Row Station Bloom loses sight of
Stephen and gets into another train by mistake and
so is obliged to follow at a distance the drunken
233
 JAMES JOYCE

youth, to whom he is the preordained and self­

appointed father, to guard him, as well as may be,
against the worst perils of the place.
There is nothing in the actual material of Circe
that should confuse or mislead the attentive reader
as, for example, there may b e in The Sirens. The
words, even when distorted, evoke at once the
intended image. What may confuse is the rapidity
of the action, the constant metamorphosis of men
and things, the changes of time and costume, and
the phantasmagorical character of all the happen­
ings. Sitting with Joyce one day in a little cafe m the
rue de Grenelle our conversation was interrupted
by the fierce pounding of an electric piano garnished
with coloured lights:
"Look!" said Joyce. "That's Bella Cohen's
pianola. What a fantastic effect ! All the keys
moving and nob ody playing."
And on another occasion during my week's stay
in Paris .Joyce said:
"Circe is a costume episode. Disguises. Bloom
changes clothes half a dozen times. And of course
it's an animal episode, full of animal allusions,
animal mannerisms. The rhythm is the rhythm of
locomotor ataxia."
It seemed to me that he found the Homeric
correspondence more difficult in Circe than in any
other episode. Ulysses is helped in this adventure
not by Pallas b ut by her male counterpart or
inferior, Hermes, god of signposts, public ways and
crossroads. Why on this occasion the male principle?
Then, what was the herb moly, a plant with dark
roots and milk-white blossom given to the hero by
Hermes to protect him against the drugs and magic
of Circe? What might it signify as a moral, a
human attribute? And what means the changing
into swine of the companions of Ulysses?
2 34
 JAMES JOYCE
Animals have always been for man something
more and something less than he. He desired to be
brave as a lion, cunning as a fox, patient as an ox,
grandly soaring as an eagle, wise as a serpent and
innocent as a dove, but he desired to be neither lion,
fox, ox, eagle, serpent, nor dove. Each was a
specialist in its limited kind. Primitive peoples
admiring this perfection in limitation, took the
names of animals for their clans, and the Boy Scouts
of our own day assemble under animal signs. The
religion of ancient Egypt is full of half man, half
animal bemgs and of animals won,hipped in their
own natural forms. Odin became for some special
purpose an eagle, a worm. Jove became a bull, a
swan. The Holy Spirit appeared in the likeness of a
dove and the spirit of scientific enquiry appeared to
Adam and Eve in serpent guise. On the negative
side sloth and greed are hoggish, ill-temper bearish,
vindictiveness feline, stupidity, obstinacy are donkey­
ish, lechery is goatish and the vain man is likened
to a peacock. The essence of the animal into man
metamorphosis seems to be that rrian becomes an
animal when he loses his many-sided human
wholeness. One of his functions gets out ofhand and
usurps the powers belonging to the governing
authority of his virtuous republic. Beastliness is one­
sidedness. A man may be like a lion, a bull, an eagle
or a serpent, but not for long or make a habit of it
without losing his mtegrity. And as the greater
includes the less man may be comparable to any
animal, but the animab, with two exceptions, can­
not simulate humanity. The lion can be only
leonine, the bull only bovine, and so on. The two
exceptions are apes and dogs-the apes because of
their strong family likeness and the dogs because
man has trained the fierce hysteria of the dog to
love and protect his person and his property as he
235
 JAMES JO Y CE
loves and protects them himself. Stephen's fear of
.the dog arises, perhaps, out of the dog's political
affiliat10ns. The dog is an executive organ of an
authoritarian state. The animal into man meta­
morphosis, as in Dr. Moreau's Island, belongs to
post-Darwin imagination trained to regard man
as a product of evolution from lower animal states.
To suppose that, by means of surgery and a drastic
drilling of reflexes, a million years of that evolution
might be crovided into a fraction of a human life­
time is a reasonable fancy for the evolutionist but is
altogether too fantastic, not to say impious, for a
mind brought up to regard the species as for all
time fixed by the single act of a creator.
If in the moral sem,e the animals are symbols of
man's lapses into one-sidednes::., on the physical side
they have given their names and something of the
essence of their beings to h1::, diseases-his lapses
from wholeness, health. From the wolf, the cat, the
owl, the cow, the chicken, the crab, the horse, the
::.ow, the elephant, the parrot we have lupus, cat
asthma, glaucoma, vaccination, . chicken pox, cancer,
hoThe asthma, scrofula, elephantiasis and psittacosis.
No doubt but that Joyce regarded the Circean
metamorphosis in this double sense of a corruption
of the mind into the one-sidedness of vice, and the
downfall of the body into the unwholesomeness of
disease.
"M0ly" was a harder nut to crack. What was the
herb that conferred upon Ulysses immunity from
Circe\ magic, an'd thus enabled him to be of service
to his companions? What was the "Moly" that
saved Bloom from a surrender of his humanity? As
a physical symbol. Bloom's potato prophylactic
against rheumatism and plague, inherited from his
mother, would serve, but the real saviour of Bloom
was a spiritual "Moly," a state of mind. Joyce wrote
236
 JAMES J OYCE

to me m 1 920: "Moly is the gift of Hermes, god of

public ways, and is the invisible influence (prayer,
chance, agility, presence of mind, power of recupera­
tioi1) which saves in case of accident. This would
cover immunity from syphilis ( av cfo,">..,s = swine
love ?) . . . . In this special case his plant may be said
to have many leaves, indifference due to masturba­
tion, pessimism congenital, a sense of the ridiculous,
sudden fastidiousness in some detail, experience."
All these play their part in Circe, but it will be
noticed that one of Bloom's trouser buttons gives
way just as he is about to suffer complete degrada­
tion under the spell of la Belle Cohen sans merci.
Thus chance supplies the moment through which he
reconquers his virility and presence of mind. The
accident tickles his sense of the ridiculous, wakes
him out of his masochistic trance, quickens his
fastidiousness and makes his experience available
for service. But there is another aspect of "Moly."
Ulysses stands to his men somewhat in the nature
of a father and guardian as well as captain. It is
while on his way through the wood to liberate them
that he meets the god of signposts and public ways.
It seems appropriate that the male divinity shall
counsel him on this not family or personal, but
comradely and quasi-social mission. What Hermes
advises him is a violent he-man gesture, an affirma­
tion of manhood: to rush upon the enchantress with
drawn sword and compel her to release his men.
And may not fatherhood itself by a stretch of the
imagination be considered a& "Moly," a plant with
black root and milk-white blossom? In any case,
Bloom's new-found fatherhood is plainly the
influence that led him to the palace of Circe Bella
Cohen in Tyrone Street. It is the dominating
influence throughout his stay in that place and is a
potent defence against the spells of Circe, sug-
23 7
 JAME S JO Y CE
gestions of perverse love. Almost the first thing
Bloom does on recovering his self-possession is to
prevent Stephen being robbed of his money by the
whores and the whoremistress.
Bloom follows Stephen to the kips as his guardian,
but immediately assumes the principal role. Stephen
is drunk, Lynch more or less drunk (and drunken
men, as the porter in Macbeth assures us, are poor
lechers) , but Bloom though tired is sober. The little
that he has drunk has stimulated his imagination
and, the night and the place aiding, his thoughts and
fancies assume three-dimensional shapes before him
and claim independent existence. The daydream,
well known in life and fiction, dominates, but scents,
shape, the population of Nighttown, his memories,
the furniture and objects of the brothel and of his
own home crowd in with whirlwind speed. The
thoughts of all persons become as visible and as
tangible as their bodies. These swift changes,
sudden appearings and vanishings, might confuse
us ifwe did not remember the golden rule: keep your
eye on Bloom.
Before I met Joyce I had for years collected
dreams (my own) but not as material for a future
liberation of myself from my complexes. Freud's
ingenious demonstration that Hamlet was issue of a
mother complex shows how valuable these things
can be. I kept the dream book as one might keep
a diary. The dreams I dreamed seemed to me to be
as well worth recording as the deeds and thoughts of
the day. The b<:'.st of daylight experience, anyway,
should be preserved in the form of work of some sort
and should speak for itself. Writing down dreams
does not in the least help to a knowledge of what
they mean, but it does, at least, lead to a feeling for
what they are. When I first read the Circe episode
of Ulysses I knew something about the substance of
2 38
 J A M ES JOY C E
the dream and had, besides, cultivated a kind of
memory needed for pursuing the elusive phantoms
of sleep to their hiding places and hauling them out
for inspection. How to convey in daylight language
the significance of dream images, the potency of
dream emotions, I never learned. Perhaps it cannot
be done except with some such word material as
Joyce uses in his unfinished Work in Progress now
appearing serially in Transition.
For me the problem was not to interpret the
meaning of a dream, but to determine its shape,
colour and action, to re-create the whole image in
my memory and to re-construct it as like as possible
in words. We feel that we saw something in a
dream, but what was our field of vision? How did
it diminish to left, to right, up and down? Objects
were there, colour, too, but what lay between the
objects? What were the colour relations? The
dreamer is on what seems to be a canal bank, his
back to a fence. A man and a boy, grey, approach
with a half-grown tiger, orange and black, on a
lead. With terror the dreamer sees the man hand
the lead to the boy, who has neither the strength
nor the authority to hold the beast. The man
meanwhile makes notes in a book, right and left
stargazing. Run the dreamer dare not, or the
.savage animal would bound in pursuit. The tiger is
now near enough that its claws can be plainly seen,
now at a distance, a patchwork of colour only. But
what is where the canal should be? And what is to
the left, to the right and behind man, boy, tiger?
Then the dreamer sees the masts of two sailing ships,
a brigantine and a full rigged ship, against houses
and a dark sky. But what is in the foreground between
him and the ships? He feels that the bright image
is vignetted off into dark. And then the continuity
of the action. Crowds of men pour out of ware-
2 39
 J A MES J O Y CE
houses across the quay to a ship moored alongside.
They are receiving their pay on the ship's focsle
deck. The dreamer digs his companion in the ribs
and both push their way through the jostling, good­
natured queue. "Payday to-day," he says, and then
finds himself on a ship where cargo is being dis­
charged with an unnecessary complication of skips,
ropes, guys, derricks. But what happened between
the payday queue and the ship b eing unloaded?
Between canal bank, tiger and masts of ships against
houses? What concerned me was the colour, shape,
continuity and atmosphere of the dream. I remem­
ber talking to Joyce about all this one evening in
the Urania wineshop. Joyce was absorb ed, pre­
occupied. Perhaps our talk on that occasion sowed
some of the seed that has since born fruit in Work in
Progress.
In the dream proper all pictures and actions are
seemingly unrelated. While we dream we know that
1t must be so, b ut on wakmg, even if we know what,
we ask ourselves in wonder, how? why? where?
Holding the head of a white-moustached old man
in his hands the dreamer watches a person, to him
unknown, trying to weigh a huge pumpkin on a
scales jammed in the balance. On the same
wooden box where stands the scales an old man
tries to cut streaky bacon with a small nail scissors.
The dreamer's corn comes off his left little toe and
out of its roots issue bright bubbles that rise aloft
and float gaily round the delicatessen shop-an
unidentifiable room, b ut one that seems to the
dreamer to be more familiar than the bedroom of
his flat in which he has lived for years. Call it a
wish fulfilment. That can b e denied as well as
proved. But whence the phantasy that combines so
many incongruous elements and endows them with
so much significance? It is not a prolongation of his
240
 JAMES JOYCE
most recent waking thoughts, for the dreamer might
just as well be a man awaiting execution as one to
whom good fortune has just come in unexpected
measure. On the other hand, the wish fulfilment of
the daydream is immediately and indisputably clear.
Any odd moment of the day is sufficient for this
simplest of all wish fulfilments. The poor man
acquires vast wealth, the weak man world power.
On a white horse, clad in golden armour, he leads
the countless hordes of his obedient followers. A
town appears in the path of his relentless march.
Its contours are strangely like the contours of the
town where he failed to get work and where the
people gave him counterfeit half-crowns. A
murmur of despair rises from the doomed city. Its
gates open and burgesses with halters round their
necks appear. In awful silence his army stands
waiting for the order to execute the city. But what
happens? The white horse cavorts, but only to
show the superb seat of him who never rode one.
The submissive burgesses, who vaguely resemble
the refusers of jobs and the givers of bad half­
crowns, are freed. They return to their city with
tears of gratitude in their eyes, bearing with them
gifts of fabulous value, but indeterminate shape.
The white wish-horse, beggar-ridden, fades, the
phantom army is demobbed and the day-dreamer
takes up his burden and carries on.
Bloom's waking trances· are three. He walks
through filthy streets, populated with shuffling,
limping, distorted creatures. He meets his dead
father and mother, who reproach him for his lack of
thrift and for his Gentile practices. To his conscience
speaks also Gerty MacDowell, who emerges from
the murk with immodest smirking exhibitions.
Following her appears his old flame, Josie Powell,
now Mrs. Breen. ·He met her after crossing O'Connell
24 r
 JAM ES JOY C E

Bridge on his way to lunch. He now repeats with

her fantastically a flirtatious scene that happened in
his bachelor days twenty years ago. Real figures and
creatures of his imagination pass him-the gaffer on
a building job where Bloom had once committed a
nuisance, loiterers, a gigantic navvy and, in the
flesh, Private Compton and Private Carr. He had
bought a crubeen and a trotter at the entrance to
Nighttown and these he now gives to a stray dog.
Here the first of his three waking trances begins. The
watch appears and demands 'his name and address.
Bloom gives a false name and disguises himself, but
the watch recognises him as Henry Flower, the
poste restante lover. A phantom Martha arises to
accuse him. Bloom disowns her and affirms that he
has a distinguished · army record, also that he is an
author-journalist. This is too much for the author of
the Tit-Bits prize story, "Matcham's Masterstroke,"
who heatedly denounces Bloom as a plagiarist, a
low cad not fit to be mentioned in mixed society.
Mary Driscoll, one-time servant to the Bloom
family, adds weight to the accusation. Bloom is in
the dock facing a multitude of accusers. He is
"dynamiter, forger, bigamist, bawd and cuckold
and a public nuisance to the citizens of Dublin."
The grand dame he saw early that morning while
talking to M'Coy takes shape as three ladies of the
highest standing in Dublin society, who accuse him
of writing to them anonymous, obscene letters.
Bloom is courageously defended by the consumptive
lawyer, J. J. O'Molloy, who- had given support to
Bloom's political moderation in Barney Kiernan's
saloon, but in spite of his defender's eloquence
Bloom is sentenced to be hanged, and Barber Rum­
bold arises to perform the fell act. The retriever at
his feet has become a beagle and now becomes the
half-putrefied corpse of Paddy Dignam. The trance
242
 JAMES JOYCE
ends. Bloom is standing before Mrs. Cohen's door,
listening to grave music within. It is Stephen at
the piano, as Bloom divines. Zoe Higgins, a whore,
guesses that he is associated with the two young men
and invites him in.
Hamlet tells Ophelia that he has more offences at
his beck and call than he has thoughts to put them
in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act
them in. For all the multitude of his acted and un­
acted offences Bloom has condemned himsel£ And
to Rosenkrantz Hamlet says: "Oh, God, I could be
bounded by a nutshell and count myself a king of
infinite space." Bloom's rise to world power occurs
between question and answer in the nutshell of his
mind when Zoe asks him if he has a "swagger root"
and he replies lewdly, "The mouth can be better
engaged than with a cylinder of rank weed." Zoe
says, "Go on. Make a stump speech out of it." And
forthwith Bloom begins, as many world conquerors
and emperors have begun, as a proletarian agitator.
"The Catiline," says Nietzsche, "is the pre-existent
Caesar." Bloom's first speech is that of a pro­
gressive municipal reformer advocating his own
favourite scheme for the betterment of the city's
tramway service. He then denounces the capitalists,
owners of all the labour-saving machinery, exploiters
of the labour of those without property. "The poor
man starves while they are grassing their royal
mountain stags or shooting peasants and phartridges
in their purblind pomp of pelf and power." In a
split second he becomes Lord Mayor of Dublin.
Cdtic and Jewish flags wave over all the notabilities
of Dublin, of the State, Church and City, and civil
and military officials together with representatives
of all trades and professions come to do him honour.
The Bishop of Down and Connor proclaims him
"Emperor President and King Chairman, the most
2 43
 JAM E S J OYCE
serene and potent and very puissant ruler of this
realm." Michael, Archbishop cf Armagh, anoints
him. Amidst scenes of unbounded enthusiasm he
founds the new Bloomusalem in Erin's green and
and pleasant land. The only dissentient voice is
that of the man with the macintosh, thirteenth
mourner at Dignam's funeral. Bloom hoists the
standard of Zion, proclaims the paradisiacal era,
prophe� ies and unfolds to the world his scheme for
a Utopian state.
But the opp9sition grows. Father Farley de­
nounces his irreligion, and Mrs. Riordan, Paddy
Leonard and Lenehan join in the hue and cry.
Theodore Purefoy denounces his contraceptual
practices, Alexander J. Dowie condemns him as a
monster of all the iniquities, and the mob howl for
his blood. On Bloom's behalf Doctors Mulligan,
Crotthers and Dixon testify to his physical disabili­
ties, a'nd Bloom bears eight distinguished children.
The Papal Nuncio demonstrates his descent from
Moses, but Bloom's fall is immment. He thinks of
joining his father by way of poison. He is publicly
burned. Then Zoe's voice brings him back to his
earthly whereabouts. Daydreaming Bloom had, for
a few seconds, lost his time identity in the force and
pregnancy of his vision. Every detail in his day­
dream was filed to an edge of knife-hke hardness
not to be found in the images of life and dream. I t
is a s logically characteristic of Bloom as any of his
acts. He i5 a friend of humanity but powerle�s and
therefore he achieves world power for the purpo5e of
realising his Utopian schemes. But the pessimist in
him overthrows his benevol�nt empire and he him­
self perishes in its ruins. The daydream is the native
element of the poor man, just as play is the element
of the rich and powerful. No man need dream if he
has the means to act his imaginative desires. Marie
244
 J AM E S J O Y C E.
Antoinette can play at being a shepherdess but the
shepherdess has neither material nor time to play at
being Marie Antoinette except in the parks and
palaces of her imagination. In our own day the
millionaire can play at being a poor man, and he
often does, but the poor man can only daydream his
visions of millionaire bliss. "Talk away till you're
black in the face," says Zoe. Appropriate, seeing
that he has, in his imagination, just been burnt to a
cinder. Zoe thinks it not good business to be
standing on the doorstep and invites Bloom to come
inside. _This he does, reluctantly and with hesitation.
"She leads hirri towards the steps, drawing him by
the odour of her armpits, the vice of her painted
eyes, the rustle of her slip in whose sinuous folds
lurks the lion reek of all the male brutes that have
possessed her."
In the salon sit Stephen at the piano and Lynch on
the hearthrug, cap back to front. Two other whores,
Kitty and Florry, people the apartment. Stephen is
improvising at the piano and between whiles talking
aesthetic philosophy to the gallful and contemptuous
Lynch .
"Whetstone," Stephen calls him. From informa­
tion received Florry knows that the end of the world
is coming. It comes. Elijah, in the form of
A. J. Christ Dowie, appears, anxious, even at the
eleventh hour, to save souls with harmonial philo­
sophy uplift. The whores get as far as confessing
their first sexual faults. Then another and more
important personage enters the room. It is Bloom's
self-critical other self which has taken on the form of
his grandfather, Lipoti Virag. Like Santa Claus, he
comes down the chimney flue. An evident parallel to
this apparition of Bloom's long since dead relative is
Hilarion in La Tentation de Saint Antoine, only the
doubts of the believer, personified in the pupil of
2 45
 J AM E S JOYCE
Flaubert's tortured saint, is, in Joyce's Circe, a
mocking old man, surveying, without illusion ofsex,
the physical defects of the singularly unattractive
whores. And Bloom listens, not with the agony of
the saint, but as if in an embarrassed dream, to the
bright mockery of his forbear, who appears in the
guise of a fabulous bird and meticulously catalogues
the ravages of time, lust and laziness on the bodies
of Zoe, Kitty and Florrie. The taut brain ofLipoti
Virag, coiled like a watch-spring in his birdskull, is
unable to bear the strain. He becomes epileptic,
inarticulate and departs, cursing. Footfalls are
heard without, the door opens, and the whore­
mistress, Bella Cohen, appears. She has an air of
authority, of one accustomed to being obeyed.
Bloom feels that the dominant woman is his master.
Weakly he prepares for surrender.
I had not long been settled in London when, in the
late autumn of 1 920, Joyce wrote to me and asked
if, among other things, I could get him some comic
papers of as bold a type as might be found on our
puritan shores. I took it that he meant those
journals, usually entitled something or other Bits,
full of mild nudities out of which the male buyer is
to get what kick he may. I bought all I could at a
shop in Camden Town and looked them over to
find the likeliest. One of them stood out above the
rest. On the cover it had the harmless bathing girl
and the still more harmless joke, nitwit nudities sug­
gesting perfectly a suet pudding ofthe sort they call
in Yorkshire "sad," but the correspondence columns
revealed it as the official organ of English tight
l�cing and heel-drill specialists. Every letter had
the authentic saccharine pedantic accent of per­
versity. Naturally I hurried to Fleet Street to buy
what back numbers were available. A cool Scot
rummaged round the office and found me half a
246
I
 JAMES JOYCE

dozen. Just in time, for the heavy hand of the law

descended on that periodical the following week.
Forty . pounds and publication. stopped was the
penalty.
As I have already said, Joyce was a great believer
in his luck. He was confident that what he needed
for his book would come to him somehow, and come
it did from all quarters, as the following incident
shows. During a lull in the composition of an
earlier episode he went to Locarno for a change of
air, and there made the acquaintance of a lady
who owned two of the islands in the Lago Maggiore.
Along the near mainland she was called Circe and
many far-fetched stories went to .make up her
Circean legend. During our stay in Locarno, in the
spring of 19 19, he met her again by chance in front
of the post office and she invited us to visit her on
her enchanted isle. This was a cunningly devised
jungle paradise, holding, among other wonders, a
grove of superb eucalyptus trees. I asked permission
to paint them, which permission was given together
with an invitation to spehd a whole day on the
island. Behind the house the Lady of the Lake had
set up a doll factory wherein a Japanese artist
struggled vainly to produce a doll, not after his own
image, but after the image of western child beauty
suitably commercialised. The portrait of a very
beautiful young woman, that of our hostess, hung
in the salon, the walls of which were further
hung with oil colour drawings depicting scenes
from the Odyssey, and , with a tapestry bearing the
words Ka\.o� <J:>lXo� Kat '/.x8po� Ka\o� (good friend and
good foe) . The long table bore a mountainous
litter of paper, string, casts, fruits, books, vessels,
silk stockings, letters and other gear such as no
bachelor's table in Europe might hope to equal.
When we assembled on the terrace for tea, the Lady
2 47
 JAMES JOYCE

of the Lake. reg�led us with a liqueur distilled b y

herself, tastmg like a cross between Ki.imrnel and
Cointreau. Before we left she entrusted to Joyce a
packet of letters and a valise of books on the theme
of erotic perversion, remarking that he might find
the contents useful as documentation for his writing.
She was afraid too that in the event of sudden
death these might be found and give rise to mis­
understandings. All this material was no doubt
useful enough to Joyce when a month or two later
he began the composition of Circe.
\Vith the appearance· of the whoremistress, Bella
Cohen, in the doorway of the room begins the third
of Bloom's daydream hallucinations. All in him
that is slave to woman rises to take charge of his
whole being. Bella Cohen's fan recognises the slave
and commands him instantly to tie up the mistress's
shoelace. Bloom changes his sex. "With a piercing,
epileptic cry she sinks on all fours, grunting,
snuffling, rooting at his feet, then lies, shamming
dead with eyes shut tight, tremblmg eyelids,
bowed upon the ground in the attitude of most
excellent master." Bella, who now wears the
trousers as Bello, commands and Bloom, who
wears the petticoats, obeys. Bello insults and Bloom
protests with weak whimperings. All the sins of
Bloom's past rise to complete his degradation.
When Bloom mentions Eccles Street as confirmation
of his virility, Bello reminds him that there is a man
of brawn in possession there. Bloom thinks he sees
Marion as a young girl again, but it is his daughter
with her lover, a student in Mullingar. Out of her
frame on the wall over his bed the nymph he cut
out of Photo Bits comes down to greet him, "passing
under interlacing yews." The yews are the yews by
Poulaphouca waterfall, and they remind him of his
youthful abuse of their shade-the nymph of his
248
 JAM E S JOYCE
bedroom manners and language. The nymph
appears "Eyeless, in nun's white habit, coif and
huge winged wimple, softly, with remote eyes."
Here a button breaks, "Bip," from Bloom's trousers
and restores to him his manhood. He attacks the
nun as Ulysses attacked the enchantress, and the
nun-nymph, ''With a cry, flees from him unveiled,
her plaster cast cracking, a cloud ofstench escaping
from the cracks." He shouts insults after her. "The
figure ofBella Cohen stands before him." How long
had he been staring at her? Overlong, perhaps, for
she remarks, "You'll know me the next time."
Bella Cohen raises the question ofpayment for the
hospitality. Lynch has no money and Stephen, too
drunk and tired to count, lays too much on the table.
Observant Bloom rescues ten shillings of it that else
had gone into the whores' stockings. Seeing that
Stephen is quite incapable of looking after money,
he takes charge of the whole lot. Then what Bloom
failed to hinder in 7 Eccles Street he actively aids
and abets in his imagination. His complaisance
becomes connivance. He becomes a flunkey to
Boylan, accepting from the conquering hero a tip
of sixpence to buy himself a gin and splash, and is
allowed to peep through the keyhole ofthe bedroom
door at the sport of Marion and Blazes. Zoe puts
twopence in the pianola and all dance to the tune of
"My Girl's a Yorkshire Girl." To Stephen, totter­
ing, giddy and weak from hunger and drink, comes
a vision ofhis mother, bidding him repent, pray and
save his soul from hellfire. He hears her prayers for
his soul and in exasperation stands, takes his ash­
plant in both hands and with Siegfried's cry,
"Nothung," strikes and smashes the chandelier.
There is a commotion. Bella wants ten shillings
for the damage. Bloom gives her one shilling,
the real value of the shattered gas chimney.
249
 JAMES JOYCE

Stephen and Lynch make for the street and Bloom

follows.
"At the corner of Beaver Street beneath the
scaffolding Bloom panting stops on the fringe of the
noisy quarrelling knot, a lot not knowing a jot what
hi ! hi! row and wrangle round the whowhat
brawlaltogether." It is Private Compton and
Private Carr with their girls. Private Carr, drunk
and quarrelsome, affirms that his girl has been
insulted by the drunk and argumentative Stephen.
Bloom elbows his way through the crowd and tries
to get Stephen away, or at any rate to make peace.
But no appeal of Bloom can turn away the motive­
less wrath of Carr, and Stephen is resolved to stand
and argue till he drops. Lynch, with the choice be­
tween standing by his friend and returning to the
brothel with Kitty, basely deserts Stephen and goes
off with the whore. Carr knocks down Stephen.
The watch appears, disperses the crowd and is
about to go through the formalities of taking names
when "Corny Kelleher, weepers round his hat, a
death wreath in his hand, appears among the by­
standers." The castle spy undertaker refuses to take
Stephen in his car to Sandycove, but performs the
welcome service of sending away the watch. He
then drives off himself, leaving Bloom and Stephen
alone. Bloom brushes shavings off Stephen's
clothes and tries to wak� him, calling, "Stephen,"
but for all answer Stephen repeats words of the
poem by Yeats he used to sing to his mother, the
"Fergus" of which is assumed by the non-poetical
Bloom to be a reference to a beloved Miss Ferguson.
With Stephen's hat and stick in hand Bloom mounts
guard over Stephen's prostrate form, and repeats to
himself the Freemason's oath of secrecy when,
against a dark wall, the bright, fairy figure of a boy of
eleven years glides past. It is Rudy, his own son.
250
 JAMES JOY C E

Bloom calls to him, "Rudy," but the unseeing ghost

passes on. The hero has rescued his companions
from the spells of Circe as whole men.
Originality in the arts usually resolves itself into
observing and interpreting some aspect of nature
that before was hidden under the laziness of con­
vention. The greatest of all artistic revolutions was
that of impressionist painting, which consisted, in
the main, of observing that shadows were full of
light and colour. Cubism, futurism and all their
variations are just so much literature by the side of
this. The Circe episode is generally regarded as the
clou of Ulysses, at any rate as the most original and
striking of all the eighteen episodes. What is the
natural material out of which it is made? It would
not move us at all if it were not nature, our own and
that of all men. The observed fact is that hallucina­
tion is common human experience. The art consists
in treating it as such. We all know it in the certified
mental case, in the case of the sufferer from fever
delirium, m the case of the overdrunk md1vidual
who lives in a world full of serpents and rodents, but
not in our own sane lives where also it plays its
part. Joyce shows it as being a common experience
of sane men. It may be objected that Stephen is
drunk. Bloom, however, is soberer than many
judges, and it is mainly Bloom's inner world that is
projected into three dimensional space.
Faces with unseeing eyes pass us in the streets, sit
near us in trams and buses, smiles lighting their lips
or scowls darkening their brows. They are the day­
dreamers, re-living some past happiness or shame,
reconstructing to their greater advantage scenes of
the past in which the advantage lay not with them,
open-handedly spending imaginary sweepstake
prizes, playing don Giovanni or don Quixote,
crowning themselves with laurels, "stepping for-
251
 J A M ES J OYCE

ward to applause earnestly" like Stephen, com­

mitting crimes of vengeance or cruelty, ruling
worlds, being tried for their lives, being buried with
pomp or shot at dawn, winning the Grand National,
lying luxuriously with film stars and winning the
love of princesses. Sometir:n�s the subconscious
mask of social discipline falls, and they laugh and
talk audibly. Unlucky for them if in such a moment
their dreams are those of Mahon or Rouse, for whose
deeds, normally, the dream is an adequate substitute.
A worker on the railway allotment near my house,
a very sane and mild gentleman, holds long con­
versations with people, to me invisible, among the
raspberry canes. None of his guests could see the
ghosts of slaughtered Bartquos at Macbeth's feast.
The widow, the widower can see in chair or bed the
body that has long since rotted in the ground, while
we wonder at their tenacity in saying "he is," "she
is" and in avoiding the fatal "was" and "has been."
The passion of the cuckold for absolute proof is not
all doubt. It is as much a device to oust painful
imaginings with less fearful realities. Take a time of
crisis snch as that in which Bloom is living, a Jew,
sonless and with memories of his dead son all the
day rolling back upon him, cuckolded to his own
knowledge, physically tired, surrounded with the
sights and smells of the brothel, and nothing is more
natural than that the thin partition between day­
dream and hallucination shall break down-that
for the space of seconds his waking dream shall
dominate his fatigued senses.
The Circe episode of Joyce's Ulysses, which has
justly been compared with the Walpurgisnacht in
Goethe's Faust, to Flaubert's La Tentation de Saint
Antoine and to Strindberg's Dream Play, differs from
all these in its essential naturalness. The whole
fantasia is steeped in an atmosphere of familiar
252
 JAME S J O Y CE
simplicity. The scene is not the Theban desert nor
the wild spaces and abysses of the Brocken nor the
shifting scene of a dream, but the common streets
of a known named city and the banal parlour of a
cheap brothel. The persons are not legendary nor
are they representative t.ypes, but a handful of
people of flesh and blood who might, we think, pass
us on the street any day. Their conflicts are not the
remote and tragic conflicts of a tortured believer at
war with his unbelief nor of the spirit of man rebel­
ling agaimt the limitations of its destiny. No super­
natural being� intervene. The decaying Dignam,
Bloom's grandfather, Lipoti Virag, Stephen's mother
exist as thoughts of Bloom and Stephen. The music
of the spheres is the music of Bella Cohen's pianola.
Time and space are shatteredwhen the blow of an
ashplant shatters a gas chimney. All the fights of
history assemble around a common street fight
which ends with a kno_ck down blow. The "Bip" of
a burst trouser button is the martial mm,ic that
rallies Bloom's forces for a -successful defence of his
manhood. Bloom's adoption of Stephen, through
which the father in him receives sublimated
expression, is presented as the simple act of a man
of good will who throws the shield of his experience
between a rash youth and the perils of the world.
Bloom's pessimism dominates the first two of his
daydream hallucinations. He feels himself guilty of
a number of petty iniquities of thought and deed.
He puts himself on trial, disguises himself, pene­
trates his own disguises, twists and turns and pur­
sues himself like a hound through his twistings and
turnings, throws himself on the mercy of the court,
rejects his plea for mercy and condemns himself to
be hanged. His megalomaniac messiah illusions are
father to his dream of world power. According to
the tradition of his race Bloom should be king in his
2 53
 J A M ES J OY C E

own home. He is not. A Darwinian rationalist and

a radical social reformer, he sees that the world is
out of joint, but most irrationally believes that he
was born to set it right. To this end he makes him­
self emperor president and king chairman, but the
mere whisper of his petty sins shakes the fabric of his
empire. He condemns himself for his insufficiencies,
abdicates, causes himself to be publicly burned, a
heretic's death, but is content to destroy himself.
He bears the world no ill will and does not condemn
or destroy it in his imagination. The third of his
daydreams is the most dangerous because it pro­
ceeds from a natural and habitual masochism. To
dream of himself as a prisoner in the dock or as
emperor on the throne is not for Bloom such a
luxurious experience as to dream of himself in
women's clothes, performing menial offices for the
whore� in a brothel under the command of a mighty
whoremistress. This is the form that swinelove, the
debasement of the imagination in sexual surrender,
takes in Bloom's case . Here it is the best of Bloom,
the responsibilities of his social fatherhood, that the
"Bip" of his lost trouser button calls to arms. The
god of public ways was standing behind him with
Olympian shears. Like his Homeric seagoing for­
bear, he rushes upon the enchantress with drawn
sword and death-denouncing looks. After that he
may be tormented by visions of the suitors' insolence
and his wife's frailty in Ithaca Eccles Street but the
spells of the enchantress are broken.

2 54
 CHAPTER TWELVE
THE journey home is described in the language of
tired men. Sentences yawn, stumble, become in­
volved and wander into blind alleys. The cliches
are as many and as well worn as the good corpora­
tion cobblestones on which they walk, and the
shapes of them are as familiar as those of the classic
doorways of dignified Eccles Street. Bloom has had
a long and exhausting day but is in better shape
than Stephen, who has eaten nothing since break­
fast and has drunk heavily. If there are pages in
Ulysses of a more dazzling virtuosity than those of
Eumaeus there are certainly none with more insight
or tenderness. The effect of the slow flowing !>tream
of familiar words is comic, till we see emerging out
of the dull coloured material a delicate and intimate
picture of the relations of a fatherly man to a young ·
man who is a wayward son. Bloom is pathetically
eager to do all that he knows is advisable to be done
for the young man's physical welfare. In the first
place he must be persuaded to eat. Then, as he is
now_ homeless, his quarrel with Mulligan having
made it impossible for him to return to the tower, his
shelter for the night must be considered. After that,
something may, perhaps, be done for the furtherance
of his worldly interests and artistic aims. With all
this in mind, and talking like one o'clock a.m. to keep
the thoughts of both from sinking unnecessarily deep,
Bloom is timid and deferential to the point of
servility towards his young companion's !,Cholastic
and artistic attainments. His deference is that wistful
2 55
 J AME S J O YCE

deference of a kind father to a self-willed son, of a

man educated in the "university of life" to the man
of academic training, and of a denationalised Jew
to a Christian Gentile.
Stephen, still drunk and still suffering from the
effects of Private Carr's right swing to the jaw, talks
little, and when he does is sententious and occasion­
ally irritable and rude. He is too weak to take a
direction for himself and so accepts that indicated
by Bloom, but he does so without pleasure or
graciousness. To all Bloom's fusi.y solicitude he is
indifferent. While Bloom is busy with him, all the
thought of which he is capable is busy with him5elf.
Between them is a barrier of race and years, and
Bloom, as a Jew, is older than Stephen by more than
the sixteen years that on the calendar separate them.
What he can do to surmount that barrier Bloom
does, but Stephen is too weak and too p,eoccupied
to try to meet him half way.
. When Bloom helps Stephen to his feet after Carr's
knock-down blow Stephen\ first thought is for a
drink. There are no pubs open and no fountain
handy so Bloom hits on the bright idea of visiting the
cabman's shelter near Butt Bridge. They walk
slowly in that direction, Bloom beguiling the way
with a purling stream of talk, all as sound as it is
banal. From the dangers of Nighttown, with its
women and crooks, he goes on to the providential
appearance of Corny Kelleher, the unreliability of
police evidence and the indiscretion of entrusting the
police with arms. He evokes no response till he
touches on the scene on Westland Row station and
the subsequent desertion of Stephen by all his
drinking companions with the exception of Lynch,
to whom Stephen alludes grimly as "Judas."
Passing under Loop Line Bridge they see the
corporation watchman, Gumley, a friend of Simon
�56
 JAMES JOYCE

Dedalus, minding the corporation stones asleep in

his sentry box, and then from out the darkness
Stephen is hailed by Corley (Lenehan's m_entor in
the story, Two Gallants, in Dubliners) . Corley is
down and out, and touches Stephen for some money.
Stephen gives him half a crown and then returns to
Bloom, who had been standing discreetly out of
earshot, and reports:
" 'He's down on his luck. He asked me to ask you
to ask somebody named Boylan, a billsticker, to give
him a job as a sandwichman.'
"At this intelligence, in which he seemingly
evinced little interest, Mr. Bloom gazed abstractedly
for the space of a half a second or so in the direction
of a bucket dredger, rejoicing in the far-famed name
of Eblana. . . . "
There is no escaping Boylan for Bloom that day.
In word, flesh or spoor he is ever present. The cab­
man's shelter is kept by one Fitzharris, reputed to
be the famous Skin-the-Goat who drove the
Phrenix Park murderers to and from the scene of
their crime. Standing out among the general run of
jarvies, stevedores and stay-out-late citizens is "a
redbearded bibulous individual, a portion of whose
hair was greyish, a sailor, probably. . . . " . This
worthy, overhearing a part of the conversation of
Bloom and Stephen, interrupts, claiming to know
Stephen's father. From this moment until their
departure the redbearded man pours out a constant
stream of tall stories to the admiration and bewilder­
ment of all present. He is W. B. Murphy, A.B., of
Carrigaloe, and he took his discharge that morning
from the three-masted schooner, Rosevean, the same
that Stephen saw from Sandymount shore gliding
into Dublin river with her sails brailed up to her
crosstrees. He is a mighty drinker and a splendid
liar, and he takes his place worthily alongside the
257
 JAMES JOY CE
Nameless One and the Citizen in Joyce's gallery of
comic-grotesque inventions. But he is a being of a
more phantasmal order than are the nameless debt
collector and the unnamed vocal patriot. These
people live somewhere. We can see "I" with Pisser
Burke at a street comer, swapping stories and filing
barbed points to them, and we can see the Citizen
reading the morning papers and stoking himself up
with indignation for his day's work in the pubs of
Dublin. But where did this man of the tribe of
Vanderdecken come from? And where does he go
after he leaves the cabman's shelter? Nobody
believes that he has a home and a wife in Carrigaloe
and a sixteen year old son, Danny. Even his lice
seem unsubstantial, like the moving picture of
Antonio on his broad chest. The rum he gurgles wa s
sold to him by Caliban, who set up a distillery on
the strength of a recipe he found in a drowned
sailor's pocket. If he stood on the scales the pointing
needle would not waver. Because he sailed on the
Rosevean, that three-masted schooner herself becomes
transparent. She is by Noland out of Bridgewater
by Moonshine and she sails straight out of Lloyd's
register into the records of Myth.
When I mentioned this character to Joyce he said
to me:
"That's a portrait of you."
"What ! Me? How's that? I understand the lice
and the bottles. But the lies! All Englishmen are
brought up on sticking to facts and understating
them."
Joyce's only comment was a tight-lipped, eye­
glittering laugh.
Bloom preserves ail open mind on all the tall
stories the sailor tells them, but they set him con­
sidering his own way of life, which he finds very
stick-in-the-mud and lacking ih enterprise. He
2 58
 J AMES J O YCE
swiftly plans a boat trip to London with which he
might combine a concert tour for Marion through
the south coast watering places. At the sight of a
half-witted prostitute caught through the open
door Bloom hides behind a newspaper. He recog­
nises her as the woman who knows his wife by sight
and who once "begged the chance of his washing."
When she is out of view he glibly denounces the
system that allows such people, probably diseased,
to prey on the male community. He is all for
hygiene and medical supervision. The talk in the
shelter veers to the subject of Ireland, and Fitz­
harris lets himself go in the Citizen vein. Bloom
takes no part in the discussion but tells Stephen
briefly of his encounter with the super-patriot in
Barney Kiernan's saloon and asks directly for
Stephen's approval of his attitude. "He turned a
long you are wrong gaze on Stephen of timorous
dark pride at the soft impeachment, with a glance
also of entreaty for he seemed to glean in a kind of
way that it wasn't all exactly . . . . " Stephen's
mumbled reply gives him neither enlightenment nor
confirmation. His plea for tolerance in religion and
politics leads to the unfolding of his Utopian plan of
£300 per annum for everybody who works, but this
generous scheme finds no favour with Stephen, who
asks to be counted out if there's any work in it. A
mention of the rich beauty and passionate nature
of southern women gives Bloom the chance to pro­
duce his wallet photograph of Marion. Her
physical excellences are one of Bloom's pet hobbies.
He lays the crumpled image of Marian's abundant
charms before Stephen, talking all the time, fussily,
volubly, hopefully, like a small picture collector
showing his treasures to a Sir Joseph Duveen, or a
wireless fan tuning in his self-constructed set for the
benefit of a Marchese Marconi. Stephen pro-
2 59
 JAMES J OYCE
nounces the likeness to be that of a handsome
woman, and Bloom is satisfied, b ut only the
promptings of good taste prevent his leaving it on
the table for a conspicuously long period so that his
young friend can get a really good eyeful of it.
When the other clients start talking about Parnell,
Bloom is reminded of a personal encounter with the
great man. Some of Parnell's faithful friends were
smashing up an O'Brienite newspaper in retaliation
for the scurrilities that had appeared in it, and b oth
Parnell and Bloom were present in the crowd.
Parnell's hat was knocked off and it was Mr. Bloom
who picked up.and returned to Ireland's uncrowned
king his fallen headgear. Parnell rewarded him
with a polite, "Thank you, sir."
There is something feminine in Bloom's distress
about Stephen's starving condition. He preaches
solid food to him like a mother. But there is another
prob lem no less important than food: Where shall
his young friend sleep? After some inner misgivings,
Bloom solves it b y taking the heroic course of
inviting Stephen to come to Eccles Street for a cup
of cocoa and a shakedown. This is his second act of
courage on Stephen's b ehalf since closing time at
Burke's. Many a married man would prefer to face
the fists of Private Carr rather than face the endless
whys and hows and whats of an indignant wife.
Here for the first time we hear en so urdine the breath
of affirmation on which Penelo pe ends. In passive
mood, ready to say "yes" to anything because it is
easier than saying "no," Stephen consents.
There is no moment in Ulysses that better exempli­
fies that indefinite' repugnance to Bloom's physical
presence, felt b y so many throughout the day, than
that in which Bloom offers his arm to the weak and
still unsteady Stephen: "Accordingly he passed his left
arm in Stephen's right and led him on accordingly.
260
 JAMES JO Y CE
" 'Yes,' Stephen said uncertainly, because he
thought he felt a strange kind of flesh of a different
man approach him, sinewless and woli>bly and all
that."
Stephen had quarrelled with at least one friend
that evening and others had left him in the lurch.
No doubt, even drunk, he felt resentful towards
them ; and yet he would have experienced no un­
pleasant shock at contact with their bodies. Mulli­
gan's arm was supple and muscular, an athlete) s
arm like that of Cranly, and there was nothing
repellent in the contact of Lynch's tough, strong
body. We must suppose that part of Stephen's
physical recoil was due to their difference of race.
The Jew sometimes hates the Gentile, and the
Gentile occasionally hates the Jew but, religious and
political differences apart, there exists also a
physical chemical repulsion, and this is felt only by
the Gentile for the Jewish man, and is experienced
by neither kind of menfolk for Gentile or Jewish
women, nor, it seems, by the Jew man for his
Gentile opposite number, nor by Gentile or Jewish
women for the males of the other race. This
physical incompatibility must explain in some
measure the curious isolation of Bloom among the
men of Dublin. Bloom is pathetically eager to pro­
claim himself a hundred per cent Irishman, and
none of the men of Dublin believes him to be an
elder of Zion or any other sort of conspirator; and
further, he does not irritate them with any Jewish
exclusiveness in the matter of eating, drinking,
fasting, praying or marrying. Irishwomen, Josie
Powell and Gerty MacDowell, for example, are very
favourably inclined towards Bloom. He is not a
proud, a self-pitying or in any way self-isolating sort
of man.
On the walk to Eccles Street Stephen is so far
261
 JAMES JOYCE
recovered that he can talk music and sing snatches
of seventeenth century songs. The conversation is
far less one-sided than it was, but they talk past each
other and establish no real contact. Bloom, hearing
the quality of Stephen's voice, immediately busies
himself with plans for Marion-Stephen . concerts,
lessons in Italian for Marion, general mental
improvement all round and paying literature
thrown in. To all Bloom's reasonable and worldly­
wise counsels and plan-making Stephen pays not
the slightest heed, but he contributes to the dis­
cussion when the subject is one that does not at all
concern himself.
"The slaughter of the suitors," said Joyce to me
as he was nearing the end of his book, "always
seemed to me unUlyssean." But early in 1 92 1 he
wrote to me that he had solved the slaughter
problem.
I was glad to hear that; for if we take the end of
the Odyssey literally the vengeance of Uly�se� and
his son does seem to take a savage and senseless
form. If, as Stephen says, Act 5 of Hamlet is "a
bloodboltered shambles," what is Book 22 of the
Odyssey? "Nine lives are taken off for his father's
one." Well, what about the fifty lives of the Odyssey
taken off for no life at all? For there is no crime
imputed to the suitors except that of eating a great
deal of their hostess's food and drinking a lot of her
wine, and behaving generally in a boisterous and
untidy way.. Slaughter is the right word. It never
resembles a fight, for should a suitor get hold of a
weapon, Pallas steps in and most unfairly mars his
usage of it. And Telemachus performing the office
of Rumbold, the demon barber, on the consenting
servant girls after they have swabbed up the bloody
mess of blood and entrails, seems to one very un­
Greek mind to be a sickeningly sadistic young prig.
262
 JAMES JOYCE
I knew that Joyce was a great hater of bloodshed.
All intelligent men are. They have more effective
weapons than arrows or howitzers or whatever the
armourer of the day provides. On so many occasions
has he prefaced an observation to me with: "You
know, Budgen, I am not a bloodymiuded man,"
that it became a kind of refrain.
One knew, of course, that it did not lie in Bloom's
character to play the he-man in any way with
violence of deed or word, nor would an emotional
scene of any kind be native to him.
Joyce wrote to me in the February of 1 92 1 : "I am
writing Ithaca in the form of a l!lathematical
catechism. All events are resolved into their cosmic
physical, psychical etc. equivalents, e.g. Bloom
jumping down the area, drawing water from the tap,
the micturition in the garden, the cone of incense,
lighted candle and statue so that not only will the
reader know everything and know it in the baldest
coldest way, but Bloom and Stephen thereby
become heavenly bodies, wanderers hke the stars at
which they gaze."
So cold is the manner and the form so condensed
that unless the vast amount ofinformation contained
in Ithaca is diluted with many times its weight of
words it is unassimilable. It is the coldest episode
in an unemotional book. Everything is conveyed in
the same tone and tempo as if of equal importance.
It is for the reader to assign the human values. How
Bloom lets himself down into the area of 7 Eccles
Street, lights the fire, draws water, counts up · his
money, undresses, and how he defeats the suitors is
told in the same colourless even manner. The
skeleton of each fact is stripped of its emotional
covering. One fact stands by the other like the
skeletons of man and woman, ape and tiger in an
anatomical museum at twilight, all their differences
263
 JAM E S JOY C E
of contour made secondary by their sameness of
material, function and mechanism. Our senses
that are wont to convey to us differentiations of out­
ward seeming in the shape of clothes, flesh, fur,
feathers, etc., are left deceived and unsatisfied.
These questions and answers look like the non­
committal jars standing in rows on the chemist's
shelves. Distilled water and deadly poison stare at
us with the same transparent, icy stare. The same
toneless, unhuman voice invites us to contemplate
tragic and comic happenings and happenings of no
importance. The comic ofIthaca is the terrible comic
of masks, the comic of the comedian who always
keeps a straight face. Something of the same sort is
observable in the archaic sculpture of Greece where
the unwounded victor and the dying warrior
plucking the fatal barb from his side smile the same
glassy smile.
Joyce once told me that Ithaca was his favourite
episode.
"It is the ugly duckling of the book," he said.
We are not brought suddenly into the presence of
the bold, proud men who wasted the substance of
Ulysses. Bloom, who has forgotten his street dbor
key, must first answer the question: to knock or not
to knock? A light in the bedroom is evidence that
Molly is in bed, so he answers it in the negative. He
enters the house by way of the area and the un­
fastened kitchen door, and then lets his guest in
through the front door. Then he makes for Stephen
a cup of Epps' Cocoa. What a lapse of time is
revealed by this once so familiar name! Now it
mearts nothing to the reader made grateful and
comforted at bedtime with Ovaltine. The two men
sit drinking their coco.a and talking on various
subjects such as the Irish and Hebrew languages,
ritual murder, their previous meetings and common
264
 J A ME S J O Y C E
acquaintances. They find that they have met on
two previous occasions, once when Stephen was
five and again when he was ten. Another point of
contact between them is the elderly and infirm
widow, Mrs. Riordan, the aunt Dante, Minerva of
Stephen's childhood, and Bloom's fellow guest
while he was staying at the City Arms Hotel.
Stephen is in better humour than he was in the
cabman's shelter and takes a lively part in the
conversation. In Bloom's kitchen they get along
excellently together. They make their voice:; heard
across the gulf of time, race and temperament that
separates them. Bloom tries to persuade his young
friend to pass the night under his roof, but Stephen
resolutely declines. They are like two ships bound
for different ports that come within hail and disap­
pear into the night.
They pause for a moment in the garden to gaze
at the sky full of stars and to micturate, for, let the
mind suffer and enjoy as it may, the moisture of the
body, in the words of Phineas Fletcher, "Runs down
to the Urine lake, his banks thrice daily filling."
Stephen must become and Bloom must be. As
they shake hands at parting a sad thought of hand­
shakes with friends now dead crosses Bloom's mind
and he is assailed by a momentary pang ofloneliness.
We are not told where Stephen sleeps. Then Bloom
enters the living room with the security of habit, but
in his absence Molly has rearranged the furniture
in one of those impulses of domestic revolution to
which all women, not least mother Europe, are from
time to time subject. He bumps his head on the
wardrobe that during his absence has wandered
from one side of the room to the other. Candlestick
uplifted, he surveys the scene. With as little
emotion as a Home Office pathologist on the scene
of a crime, he takes note of the contents of the room,
2.65
 J AMES J OYCE
observing here and there evidences of Blazes Boylan's
recent visit. On the music rest of the piano is "the
music in the key of G natural for voice and piano of
Love's Old Sweet Song" open at the last page, testify­
ing to the studies of Blazes and Marion. Two chairs,
one soiled, facing each other bear silent witness to
the good feeling and comprehension existing between
cantatrice and impresario. Bloom's reflections roam
over a vast field as he sits in the silent room; space,
the stars, the events of the day, the state of his
fortunes, the home of his dreams, how to get rich,
the perfect advertisement, where was Moses when
the candle went out?
Appropria�ely it is in the bedroom that Bloom
meets and disposes of the suitors. From this base he
reviews and takes the salute of the host of his wife's
admirers. He finishes undressing and enters the
bed, head to his wife's feet.
"What did his limbs, wlien gradually extended,
encounter?
"New clean bedlinen, additional odours, the
presence of a human form, female, hers, the imprint
of a human form, male, not his, some crumbs, some
flakes of potted meat, recooked, which he removed.
"If he had &miled why would he have smiled?
"To reflect that each one who enters imagines
himself to be the first to enter whereas he is always
the last term of a preceding series even if the first
term of a succeeding one, each imagining . himself
to be first, last, only and alone, whereas he is neither
first nor last nor only nor alone in a series originating
in and repeated to infinity."
Bloom considers the whole series of Marion's
lovers and especially the latest addition thereto and
re,cent occupant of his bed, Blazes Boylan. His
subsequent reflections are affected by the
antagonistic sentiments of envy, jealousy, abnega-
266
 JAMES JOY CE
tion and equanmuty. There follows a rational
explanation ofthe origin of these sentimenfl) and of
the order in which they are experienced.
"Why more abnegation than jealousy, less envy
than equanimity?
"From outrage (matrimony) to outrage (adultery)
there arose nought but outrage (copulation) yet the
matrimonial violator of the matrimonially violated
had not been outraged by the adulterous violator of
the adulterouslv violated."
His ultimate reflections are those of the purely
rational man whose emotional reactions are quickly
stilled in thought. Tiredly he envisages some
forms ofhusbandly self-assertion but abandons them
as either immoral or useless or inexpedient. In the
vast scheme of things with which he identifies him­
selfthe adultery ofhis wife becomes an unimportant
event. He considers the nature and desires of the
human body and its functional necessities and
mechanisms ". . . the futility oftr::umph or protest
or vindication : the inanity of extolled virtue: the
lethargy ofnescient matter: the apathy ofthe stars."
It is in the unsmiled smile ofhis equanimity that
the bowstring of the lord of 7 Eccles Street most
loudly twangs. It slaughters the suitors ofMarion as
effectively as did the divinely aided Ulysses those of
Penelope. With bloodless thought Bloom banishes
his rivals to nonentity, and it must be admitted that
he does his work just as sweepingly well as the more
bloody-minded archer king of Ithaca. His triumph
is, in a sense, all too complete; for he condemns to
vast spaces of time-hurls into eternity in short­
not only the adulterous violators . but the adulter­
ously violated, and himself too, the matrimonial
violator. The temporal institution of monogamic
marriage also goes by the board; for in that region
whereto were expedited suitors, wife and husband
267
 JAME S JO Y C E

there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage.

What then remains after this holocaust? Only him­
selfwith his desires-not as husband or householder
but as Leopold Bloom, Einziger with no Eigentum,
the man ofno property, and Marion by his side, not
as his wife but as a symbol ofall fleshly womanhood,
wherever or: whenever existing. He gravely salutes
that womanhood in the shape ofthat flesh in which,
for him, it most truly resides. Byron wi�hed that all
the women ofthe world had one rosy mouth to kiss,
and Bloom's salute is bestowed, I take it, in that
sense though not in that place. Ifwe saw a hint of
defeatist resignation or masked bitterness in Bloom's
unsmiling, smileful tranquillity, we should imagine
a morrow on which the mask might fall, the reality
take the place of the appearance. We are given no
such hint. Bloom's victory is to all appearances
complete. The derangement of the bed wakes
Marion, who begins a truly wifely catechism, to
which Bloom with perfect presence of mind replies,
giving an account ofhis day's activities, largely true,
but with such adaptations and omissions as shall
make it domestically acceptable. The conversation
becomes increasingly more laconic till it fades
altogether, and then, but not before ordering two
eggs for his to-morrow's breakfast, to variations on
the name and adventures of Sinbad the sailor, the
tired hero drops off to sleep.
But Marion remains awake and it is she who has
the last word. Some strangenesse� of manner on
the part of Leopold have to be explained; some
lapses in his narrative have to be filled in with guess
work; and then, guessing and explaining, her mind
runs through all the world that is hers. In eight
unpunctuated sentences of about five thousand
words each she paints a portrait of herself not
known to Leopold, and a portrait of a Poldy not
268
 JAMES JOYCE
known to him or his friends, and a picture of the
world, the values of which would be disputed by
every other person in the book. There is none of the
coldness of an abstraction in Molly Bloom, but she
is more symbolical than any other person in
Ulysses: What she symbolises is evident: it is the
teeming earth with her countless brood of created
things. Marion's monologue snakes its way through
the last forty pages of Ulysses like a river winding
through a plain, finding its true course by the
compelling logic of its own fluidity and weight.
Joyce wrote to me at the time he was composing
Penelope: "Her monologue turns slowly, evenly,
though with variations, capriciously, but surely
like the huge earthball itself round an:d round
spinning. Its four cardinal points are the female
breasts, arse, womb and sex expressed by the. words
because, bottom (in all �enses bottom button, bottom
of the class, bottom of the sea, bottom of his heart)
woman,yes." It is clearly in her symbolical character
as fruitful mother earth that Molly speaks, through
the medium of her body, for what _individual,
socially limited woman, if she were capable of enter­
taining such thoughts, would not be secretive enough
to suppress them? Her very isolation (she is alone
on the stage while all the rest sleep) gives her the scale
and proportion of a giantess. Her obscenities of
thought lack no verisimilitude. They are ofwoman;
but no obscenity is womanly. The province of social
woman is the erotic: the obscene is to her a kind of
brawling in church. Molly Bloom is the creation of
a man; and Joyce is, perhaps, as one-sidedly
masculine as D. H. Lawrence was one-sidedly
feminine. Molly betrays her womanhood when she
says she can find nothing interesting in the work of
Master Frans;ois Rabelais. She prefers Sweets of
Sin and the novels of Monsieur Paul de Kock. But
269
 J AMES J OYCE
on the other hand, her unspoken thoughts con­
cerning her amours, remote and recent, are at least
as precise and candid as those of her sleeping
partner. As is quite natural, the prowess of Boylan
occupies the foreground of her memory; but she has
more romantic attachment to her first lover, Mulvey,
a naval lieutenant, and to the gentlemanly soldier,
Gardner, who lost his life in the Boer War, and even
to the foppish tenor, Bartell d'Arcy. In the end
her thoughts revert to Leopold. It is the memory of
his proposal to her, in which thoughts of all her
other lovers and recollections of her girlhood in
Gibraltar mingle, that carries her into sleep.
· " . . . . when I put the rose in my hair like the
Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and
how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I
thought well as well him as another and then I .asked
him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked
me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and
first I put my arms around him yes and drew him
down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume
yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I
said yes I will Yes."
Both Bloom and Marion have this in common
that they bring out of inconstancy tributes to
fidelity. Bloom's eye roves throughout the world of
women but always with the image of Marion as a
standard with which to test their comparative
excellencies, and Marion's measure of value for all
males is Leopold. Joyce wrote to me of Molly
Bloom's nonstop monologue: "This is the indispens­
able countersign to Bloom's passportto eternity." But
what a passport officer! And what a countersign!
The first use she makes of her consular authority is
to retouch his photograph and alter his signature;
and her distinguishing marks fill up pages. "Aggra­
vating." "Fussy." "Gets in the way." "Sly boots
2 70
 J AM E S J OY C E

b ut I can see through him,'' "Poser." "Muddler."

Marian's visa on Leopold's passport will bring
trouble on him in all the countries and mandated
territories of eternity. To his wife, Bloom, the
toilinured trier in many trades, is just an aggravating
person who potters around the house instead of
getting a good job in a bank. When he got the sack
from Joe Cuffe's he sent Marion to try to persuade
Joe to reinstate him. The Utopian socialist friend of
the human race, Bloom, is a foolish man who wastes
his time with a lot of good-for-nothing companions
instead of looking after his family. She knows
Leopold must be wrong about Arthur Griffiths being
a political genius because Griffiths' trousers are such
a bad fit. Bloom the rationalist philosopher, doubter
in the existence of God, is to her a misguided,
crotchety oddity who obstinately-refuses to see what
is right under his nose. The prudent man, so careful
of his deportment away from home, is known to
Molly as an ·incurable sniffer after women who can't
be trusted alone in the house with a servant under
fifty. For all his modest airs he is a megalomaniac.
If they asked him could he ride the favourite in the
Grand National he would say yes. And he is a
blunderer who continually puts her in awkward
situations, as when he took her out for a row in
rough weather or sympathised flirtatiously with a
pert and disobliging sales lady. The only things she
can find to say in his favour are that he is thoughtful
for elderly ladies, polite to waiters, doesn't drink
and knows a lot about people's insides. Her judg­
ment of Poldy may be summed up as, "a poor
thing but my own."
· Some characters in fiction ask us to measure and
weigh them with moral weights and measures.
Marion defies us to do so. If she lived in our world
we should criticise her morals, and good mothers
271
 J A MES J O Y C E
would warn their sons to have nothing to do with
her, but she is out of reach of our yardstick and
scales. She dwells in a region where there are no
incertitudes to torture the mind and no Agenbite
of Inwit to lacerate the soul, where there are no
regrets, no reproaches, no conscience and conse­
quently no sin. Perhaps she is so superwomanly
because a man created her out of femimne elements
only. Nature is rarely so exclusive. Her thoughts
jostle one another like the citizens of an ega­
litarian republic. From her bodily functions and
those of her lovers her attention flits impartially
to to-morrow's dinner or where does all the dust
come from, from the misdeeds of the skivvy of a
year ago to the monkeys on the rock of Gibraltar,
the contents of her linen cupboard or the lives of
seamen and engine-drivers. And she is preoccupied
with what men want her to be as the angler is pre­
occupied with the que5tion of bait for fish. There
can be but few women in literature that do not look
sickly in their virtues or vices alongside Molly Bloom.
She has neither vice nor virtue. She is neither
mysterious vamp nor sentimental angel. In Joyce's
own words in a letter to me she is, "sane full
amoral fertilisable untrustworthy engaging limited
prudent indifferent Weib. '!eh bin das Fleisch das
stets bejaht !' "
 CHAPTER THIRTEEN
WHEN Ulysses was first published, what struck
most people was its size and after that its obscenity.
Quite well known words, much used in speech, were
:-,et down in print. Functions of the human body, not
often alluded to in works of fiction, were mentioned
by their familiar names. Unspoken and unacted
thoughts, multitudes of which pass through the
minds of all of us, were called forth from their
hiding place behind the social mask and given a
hearing or, as in the case of Bloom's hallucinations
in Bella Cohen's brothel, were given an objective
fulfilment. If . there were any who believed that
Ulysses might prove to be an erotic book-a kind of
Sweets of Sin only bulkier-they must have been
quickly undeceived when they breathed the first
breath of its cool air. Those whom the common
obscenities of life could not surprise or shock were
held fascinated by the multitude of technical devices
employed with so much skill and, so needful is a
convenient label, set · Joyce down as a master of
technique pure and simple. Yet others, who felt
that they were face to face with a view of the world
both novel and personal, dug for the underlying
philosophy of the book, its evaluation of the world
in terms of human experience; and these were
forced, if they pushed their search for philosophic
content to extremes, as they sometimes did, to
regard the characters in the book as abstractions.
They valued the characters not for what they are
but for what they mean, thus stultifying their view
2 73
 JAMES JOYCE

of Joyce's book by conceiving it as a complicated

allegorical picture. My own view was and is that the
characters are, in the first place, living, breathing
human beings. The life of the book comes first and
the philosophy afterwards. Obscenity is a question
of manners and conventions for ever changing.
Virtuosity, if it stood alone, would soon become
demoded, and philosophy too, but living character
stays through whatever material it is presented.
In particular Ulysses depends on the plasticity and
life of Bloom. Is he a whole man seen wholly, as it
was intended that he should be? To me he is a man,
organic, complete, individual and limited by his
individuality, a living person created in the scale
and proportion of nature and society. All men must
be the same or they would not be able to com­
municate with one another and they must all be
different or they would have nothing to communi­
cate. Bloom is the same as all men and therefore
communicable, and he is different from them all and
therefore memorable. As little as any of the great
characters of fiction is he a human average. He is a
Jew, but not any Jew, and he is a man but not
everyman. Everyman would be everybody, and
everybody is a monstrosity. Noman is nobody, and
nobody is a wraith. If we interpret Bloom as a
symbol we must first accept' him as a man. Hamlet
may be regarded as the sacrificed king-god or the
latest incarnation of the mother complex, but he
must first interest us as the tragic prince. And
Bloom in this sense is to be looked on first as a
Jew born in Dublin, married, father of a family,
occupying a modest pm,ition in the commercial life
of the city, a man of singular tastes and rare
thoughts, and with a unique though not spectacular
destiny-something that was always possible, was,
but can never·happen again. After that he may be
274
 J AME S JOYCE

Wandering Jew, Messiah, Antichrist, Science or

anything else.
Other persons in the book appear occasionally to
be more pregnantly characterised than Bloom.
The Citizen, for example, the Nameless One, but
that is because they are graphically, not three
dimensionally conceived and presented. They are
caught and transfixed in some vital gesture as the
draughtsman catches and transfixes his subject.
What is more vivid th an a drawing by Daumier or
Rowlandson? The violent gesture, the grimace, are
foreign to the medium in which Bloom was con­
ceived. We must go round him, see him in all lights
a�d from all angles; never forget the other side of
him ; and always feel the plane that leads into depth.
His personality must grow on us rather than strike
us. That we see inside Bloom is inevitable, for
a man is not only flesh and blood but a living soul,
personality if you like, whose habitation i& that solid
body. If we could not see behind the outer husk of
him he would be ·no more than a papier mache
figure such as we see in a carnival procession. As a
creature of his environment he reflects constantly
the light, shade and colour of that environment ,
place and time. That pre&ent essence which is
Bloom and that social ambient in which he lives
mingle in him together with the past out of which
he came. The action of the day is never suspended
to enable us to enter Bloom's thoughts. While the
barque of his body is gliding through the limited
spaces of Dublin his mind is roaming freely through
its own larger world. Part of it sits watchfully at the
helm of his body,; another part of it looks idly at sea,
sky and far horizons; yet another part of it dwells
continually on home and wife; there is a listener
ready for all divine messages and there is a tale­
teller constantly repeating the story of the past. It
2 75
 J A M E S JO Y C E
may seem strange, but it b certainly true, that we
can live sixteen years in intimate contact with
people and know less about them than we know
about Bloom in sixteen hours. If any ingenious
writer liked to change the mode of narration
adopted by Joyce in Ulysses and turn his book into
a Bloom saga in many volumes with an eventual
omnibus, the material for that exercise is to hand
in the seven hundred and thirty-two pages enclosed
in the well known blue and white covers.
It might begin in Szombathely, Hungary, with
Leopold's father, a man approaching middle age.
Hungarian local colour, economic conditions,
deci�ion to emigrate. The long journey to London.
Conditions of transport in Europe in the late fifties.
He arrives in London at about the time of the second
Derby-Disraeli administration. A short stay in
London and then on to Dublin where he has heard
that good business is to be done. Picture him, a dark
haired, swarthy complexioned Jew, hanging on to
the weather rail as the ship dips her nose into the
sea, Howth Head visible on the weather bow. Com­
patriots, bearded and pious, welcome him on the
firm soil of Irdand. Two events of the greatest
importance happen in 1 865 : after a visit to the
offices of the Society for Promoting Christianity
among the Jews he is converted to the Christian
faith and he marries Ellen Higgins. Leopold is born
in I 866 and is baptised in the Protestant eh urch of
Saint Nicholas Without, Coombe. Leopold's
infancy and early schooldays. He becomes aware
that he is different from the other boys. He makes
acquaintance with racial antagonism expressed in
the horseplay, occasionally good-humoured but
often not, of Gentile schoolboys. He asks his father
what they mean when they sing "I had a bit of pork"
and other ditties for his benefit. Patiently he tries to
276
 JAMES JOYCE

understand what the "difference" is. Three Irish

boys baptise Leopold under the parish pump in the
village of Swords. ' What his parents said when he
returned with his collar and coat drenched with
pump water. His equanimity, coupled with a fine
feat ofmicturition, wins for him a certain measure of
prestige among his schoolfellows. In his way he is a
courageous boy, never sullen or rancorous, and he
does his best to enter into the games amd pursuits of
the other boys. There is that incident with the
harriers. Considering his milieu he is precociously
intellectual. In his fourteenth year he is a free­
thinker. He divulges his disb elief in the Protestant
Church to his friend, Percy Apjohn. Two years later
Leopold expresses to Daniel Magrane and Francis
Wade, to the consternation of both of them, his
agreement with the theories of Charles Darwin,
expounded in his works, The Descent of Man and
The Origin of Species. His father needs his services in
the business, and at the age of sixteen he starts
travelling in cheap jewellery. The social question
claims his attention. At first he is an enthusiastic
supporter of the Radical politics of the eighteen
eighties and a follower of Michael Davitt, Parnell,
and Gladstone. Later his humanitarianism and
passion for s social justice take the form of a vague and
quite per onal Utopianism. His first erotic en­
counter with a woman was with Bridie Kelly, "on
a drizzling night in Hatch Street, hard by the
bonded stores there," but the heavy tread of the
watch interrupts the proceedings. On the 2 7 th of
June, 1886, at the Queen's Hotel, Ennis, Bloom's
father dies of aconite poisoning. The sad pilgrimage
of Leopold to his father's funeral. He meets Marion
at a social evening at Matt Dillon's home in
Terenure. "Singing. Waiting she sang. I turned her
music. . . . Why did she me? Fate." Their great
2 77
 JAM E S JOYCE
day was one on Howth Head together among the
ferns and rhcdcdendrons. Marion says "Yes."
Bloom is baptised into the Roman Catholic Church
with a view to his matrimony in 1888. Millicent is
born in June of the following year. Bloom works
for Joe Cuffe, cattle salesman, for Thom, auctioneer,
for Wisdom Rely. Some domestic trouble there
must have been every time he came home with the
news his job had come to an end. At intervals he
peddled lottery tickets, at that time illegal (he
escaped criminal proceedings at one time only
through the intervention of a friend at court),
or bought and sold cast off clothes. He visits Mrs.
Dandrade at her hotel on business and is astonished
at the sans gene with which she displays her intimate
underwear. He appreciates her black silk garments
of all descriptions. Bob Cowley and Ben Dollard
come rushing to the Blooms one evening for a dress
suit for Ben Dollard, who is due to sing at a concert
and has no wedding garment. In the Bloom col­
lection of left off garments in their Holles Street
house is only one dress suit that Big Ben can get on
and that is miles too small. This skin tight dress suit
is for years one of the standing jokes of the Bloom
household. "Molly did laugh when he went out.
Threw herself back across the bed, screaming,
kicking. . . . Oh, the women in the front row."
While they are staying at the City Arms Hotel,
Bloom dances attendance on an elderly widow,
Mrs. Riordan. She did not remember him in
her will. " . . . that old faggot Mrs. Riordan
that he thought he had a great leg of and she never
left us a farthing all for masses for herself and her
soul. . . . " Rudolph is born and dies at the age of
eleven days. This was the beginning of an estrange­
ment between Marion and Leopold. Bloom's rivals
in Marion's affections. His friends and their
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 J AMES JOYCE
fortunes. The second Boer War must have found
Bloom a convinced anti-imperialist, a pro-Boer but
not a rabid one, one rather who could see also the
Uitlander's point of view. He was sorry to see his
friend, Percy Apjohn, join the army and leave for
South Africa, but it grieved him still more to hear
that that brave and serious man had fallen in
action on the Modder River. Marion was never per­
turbed by Leopold's pre-marital flirtation with
Josie Powell, and his post-marital interferences with
the servant girls were annoying and destructive to
domestic authority but not otherwise dangerous.
Marion and Blazes Boylan, Milly Bloom and Alec
Bannon, provide material for the continuation of the
Bloom saga in the political and social atmosphere
of early twentieth century Dublin. This is but an
indication of the vast amount of material available
for turning the breadth of the one-day treatment of
Bloom's history into the depth of fifty years. The
past of Bloom is summed up in Ulysses in the day on
which we see him. It could as well be extended into
the thirty-eight years of his life, but we should be
none the wiser.
Bloom is a Jew but he is no stage Jew. The stage
figures representing races and nationalities must be
put away from the foreground of our minds before
we can see the realities. Who has ever seen in real
life the English John Bull or the blue-eyed Michel of
Germany or the Cohens and the Kellys? These are
just bundles of community mannerisms. Bloom is a
product of many years of patient and independent
observation and is one of the least stagey characters
in fiction. The English imagination is still haunted
by the tragically one-sided figure of Shylock, but
Shylock was a product of the ghetto of the middle
ages. Inasmuch as he is a Jew, Bloom is the product
of three hundred years of social and political
2 79
 J A ME S J O Y C E
emancipation. Shylock was a member of an outcast
community (he was probably less oppressed than the
poor peasant of his day) and we see him fighting
back with all the weapons his racial solidarity and
personal rancour find available. The Jew of our
day, in England at any rate, has nothing to fight as
a Jew. He can be a cabinet minister, viceroy of
India, editor of a newspaper, director of a banking
house, art critic or any other person of authority,
and nobody cares what or why or when he worships.
It occurs to Bloom .that he might have been a
Protestant minister, Catholic priest or revivalist
missionary. No such thought could have occurred
to Shylock.
But for all his social and political freedom Bloom
is something of an exile in Dublin. Why? He has no
religion. He is perhaps the most non-religious
character in fiction. Having left the old gods of his
race he has been unable to accept those of the
stranger, so that he lacks all the resorts of tribal
fellowship and defence. That he has become a
Christian only makes his Jewish isolation the more
complete. Whether on account of his race or his
personality, he is not fully accepted into the intimacy
of any group. In general he is neither liked nor dis­
liked. He is respected but not desired, accepted but
held at arm's length. Nothing brings people nearer
to one another than community in fearing, loving
and hating, and Bloom has a scale of values
different from that of his fellow Dubliners. He
feels and thinks differently. Lenehan says of him
that he is a bit of an artist, John Wyse Nolan
acknowledges his generosity, finding that "there is
much kindness in the Jew,"and Davy Byrne and
Nosey Flynn testify to Ii.is prudence and good will,
but nobody comes quite near him. It is as if a
transparent film cut him off from his surroundings.
28o
 J AM E S JOY CE

He can see and be seen, but he can never be

touched, and that despite all the apparent amiabili­
ties of intercourse. He sits together with three
acquaintances in the funeral carriage, but the
others thwart his funny stories and hear in shocked
silence his common sense humane views on death.
Stephen's irreligion would shock them less than
Bloom's agnostic indifference. Joe Hynes forgets
his forename, never knew it, perhaps, but he
remembers those of all the other mourners. Nobody
says "Come along Leopold" when they pay a visit
to Parnell's grave, and when, an hour later, some
gentlemen of the press make a move in the direction
of Mooney's it occurs to none of them to &ay,
"Come and have a drink, Leopold." In fact,
nobody in Dublin, with the exception of his wife,
mes his forename. Even his colleague, Joe Hynes,
evidently a decent sort of chap (he did Bloom the
honour of borrowing three shillings off him, and he
stands him a cigar) , agrees with the others in Barney
Kiernan's in their condemnation of Bloom. "He's a
bloody dark horse himself," says Joe. The drunken
students in the maternity hospital listen to him with
attention and some respect but rather as a curious
outsider than as one of themselves. Only in one
scene does he completely dominate the situation and
that, curiously enough, is when he is on an errand
of fatherly protection bent and is opposed by a
masterful woman of his own race. It is as if he
were a hundred years older than his fellow Dubliners.
His prudence and secretiveness are to them a re­
proach. His simple inborn pessimism has a de­
pressing effect on a generation eager in pursuit of
tonics. Nobody wants to slap him on the back or
take hold of his arm. He has another consistency of
flesh and a different family odour. Even in his home
he is an unknown man. He breakfasts · alone and
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 JAMES JOYCE
sleeps at the opposite end of the bed from Molly.
Their daughter has begun to form an alliance with
her mother against him. The Poldy of whom
Marion thinks with pleasure is becoming a memory
of her past but is not a present fact.
But one feels that the isolation in which Bloom
lives is not an unhappy one. He wills it, much as he
wills his domestic betrayal in that he makes no effort
to prevent it. If he showed signs of self pity we
should the better understand it, but there is no self ·
pity in his mind, no rancour and no bitterness. There
is no rage or jealousy in the schoolboyish confusion
he experiences at the sight of his rival, Blazes
Boylan. That affair occupies him, but not to the
exclusion of the world that he sees and knows. In
fact, we may say that envy, hatred, malice and un­
charitableness are absent from the mind of Bloom
as are rancour and self pity. His sexual life seems to
be less free from blemish. It is not that he admires
the back view of the next door servant girl, or tliat
he ·yields to the glamour of the expensively clad
rich woman, or that his senses are stimulated by the
sight of silk petticoats in a shop window, or even
that he reacts in the most masculine way possible at
the moment to the provocation of Gerty Mac­
Dowell. But we cannot forget that (in thought at
least) he offers his wife to other males and writes
obscene .letters to highly placed Dublin dames, that
in his imagination he becomes a flagellant, and that
(perhaps in fact) he persuades girls to use foul words.
Let us, however, be honest and admit that we do
not think that entertaining a guilty thought is
equivalent to performing a guilty action whatever
the Scriptures may say to the contrary, and let us
be on our guard against allowing our jealousy to
throw a wrath-provoking picture of an insulted
virgin on the screen of our imagination. Then we
282
 JAMES JOYCE
can set it down that to complete his humanity Mr.
Bloom has something of a little devil about him
somewhere.
As an all round man he couldn't very well be a
man of one job only. How he lost his job at Hely's
or at Thom's we do not know, but it was busybody
interference in the affairs of a grazier that · cost him
his job at Joe Cuffe's. One rather dreads the day
when he will . feel impelled to show Myles Crawford
and Councillor Nannetti how to run the Freeman's.
He is already beginning to do so. Here again
we feel that if he is not a great success at holding
down jobs it is because he doesn't want to stay
too long in one place. Unlike the average of his
race he is not a good business man. The occupation
that suits him best is that of commercial traveller.
It allows him time and scope for his dilettantisms
and dreams. We are told that he represents the
scientific spirit and Stephen the artistic, yet of the
two Bloom is, perhaps, more the dreamer. Which
is as it should be, for the artist, being under the
necessity of doing something, may not dream all the
time, but the man of science may do so ifhe chooses.
This is no truer to-day than it was in 1904 but is
rather more evident, for our scientists become daily
more poetic and our poets hourly more scientific.
It is very worthy of being noted that astronomy is
the science that most attracts Bloom; and that, I
take it, is because its real vagueness and its air of
precision provoke his imagination and because the
vast times and spaces with which it deals flatter his
pessimism by making him feel small. And in spite
of his unperturbed, complacent air, is there a
character in literature more pessimistic than Bloom?
He seems to have an innate knowledge of the
second law of thermodynamics. His universe is
running down.
 JAMES JOYCE
It seems to me self-evident that there is more
merit in the goodness and humanity of the godless
unbeliever than in the righteousness of the god­
fearing. The one is following his own good instincts
and the other is obeying the crack of the whip or is
hoping for an eternal reward. Belief in any case is a
positive force. Take away from it one object and it
will attach itself to another. Bloom's disbelief in the
existence of God and individual immortality is no
hindrance to his appearing the most reasonable and
humane of all the Dubliners in Ulysses. And this is
quite logical, because his power of belief is con­
centrated, without any theological distraction, on
the existence of his own pers�m and of the social
world in which he lives. Marx says somewhere that
" Christianity is the sublime thought ofJudaism, and
Judaism is the common application of Christianity."
In the sense in which this is probably meant, B!oom,
the Jewish agnostic, is more Christian than his
religious contemporaries. Not because of his many
little acts of kindness (Martin Cunningham or
Simon Dedalus would be quite capable of doing as
much) but because he is incapable of hating or
knowingly harming anybody.
Bloom's politics are as little spectacular as are his
good deeds, and yet I fear that they are of the kind
that in the days that are with us and near us
lead to the dungeon and the firing squad. To the
conservative they are revolutionary ; to the
revolutionary they are menshevik, social reform­
ist; to the ardent nationalist they are pacifist,
defeatist; to the fascist they are anarchist. And, for
all his prudence, there is in Bloom · a strain ot
impulsive simplicity, as there certainly was in
Ulysses, that would probably lead him to speak
lip just when he ought for his own good to lie low.
He did it in Barney Kiernan's saloon and might
284
 JAMES JOYCE
do it again in still more dangerous circumstances.
The Jesuit-trained Stephen would be more politic.
Where his silence and indifference seem suspicious
to the suspicious he would know how to secure
himself protection through others. Bloom differs
from Marx and Disraeli (both, by the way, bap­
tised Jews like himself) in that he has no knowledge
of or belief in historical development like the
one, or sense of popular government and popular
pageantry like .ne other. The content of Bloom's
Utopia is the content of all Utopias worth while­
the general good and unity of the whole human
race. The form of it is that of a middle class day­
dream-endowment at birth, three hundred pounds
a year for all who work, improvement in the public
services, complete freedom of expression under the
shelter of constituted authority mildly and justly
exercised, and peace, of course, perpetual and
universal with disarmament and general good will.
He has no system, no party, no press and no plat­
form, in short, no means whatever for carrying his
ideas into effect, for he is too fastidious in his choice
of means, too prudent to entrust the realisation of
them to armed force whether from above or below.
Nietzsche wrote a book in which he advocated the
transvaluation of all values. That book left me with
only the vaguest ideas as to what the new values
might be or how they would look if they received
a final shape in individual action and social organi­
sation. What was to be our attitude towards our
neighbours and ourselves? Being in the dark myself,
I watched others who tried to put Nietzschean
values into practice, and their actions resembled so
much those of bright young people that it was only
fair to conclude that they knew no more about it
than I. There is no transvaluation of values in
Ulys.ses, but there is in it a revaluation of some
285
 J A M ES J OYCE
human values that, whether the reader agrees with
it or not, has the merit of being as clear as a repre­
sentation of life can make it.
The human body is neither neglected as being a
low material affair nor is it glorified as if its health
and shapeliness were the chief thing in life. In fact,
it is as if the dangerous dyarchy of body and mind
were altogether denied. Liver, lungs, heart, blood,
sex, the senses and their organs are shown to be as
much of the mind as thought is of the body. Gener­
ally throughout the book, and particularly in the
person of Leopold Bloom, the much de�pised
"bourgeois" virtues of honesty, kindliness, prudent
generosity and the rest are reaffirmed and even
exalted, but other accepted values are by implica­
tion written down. There is no anti-religion (or
anti- anything) in the book, yet the most irreligious
man in it is also the best and most human. A
marriage is shown with its own form of constancy in
which sexual possessiveness plays but a small part.
The eternal triangle in that menage is given a new
isosceles twist. It is true that Bloom and his rival,
Blazes Boylan, are presented in different materials.
Bloom is modelled in the round while Blazes Boylan
is drawn in a manner that verges on caricature. Yet
the outcome of Marion Bloom's marital infidelity is
that the husband cocu takes on a passive, heroic
aspect, the .wife is represented as so much a creature
of instinct and appetite that she stands well out of
reach of all reproach, and her lover appears as a
somewhat comic super in a play which is essentially
hers. The acts of Marion and her lover are viewed
as purely mechanical exercises and therefore as
something fundamentally comic.
There is no more virtue in the womanhood of
Ulysses than there is in the earth unc:ler our feet. The
greatness of woman lies in her absolute necessity, in
286
 J AME S J O YCE
the impossibility ofimaginmg the world without her.
As Joyce represents her she is too vast for any pedestal
to bear her weight. The only note of awed respect
for woman that creeps into the boisterous discussion
on sex in the maternity hospital is when her austere
function as childbearer is considered, and it is Bloom
who sounds that note. The worship of motherhood
and mother love is definitely deflated, and in the
words of Stephen and the acts of Bloom fatherhood is
given a new significance. But Bloom is not of the
breed of Pere Goriot. We can be greatly touched by
the woes of Pere Goriot, and yet think that his love
and sufferings are motherly, father though he be. It
would not be unnatural for a widower to act the
mother. & is usual with Joyce, the simplest
incidents are used to convey the deepest things.
There are no tears of recognition, no rescues from
shark-infested seas. Bloom cannot even save
Stephen from a punch on the jaw. All that he does
is to hover round him for three or four hours, look
after his money, bore him with banal advice, serve
him with Epps' cocoa, and invite him to stay the
night on an improvised bed. When they take leave
of each other we feel certain that they will never
meet again. And yet in a measure that no spectacu­
lar action could have achieved, we are led from the
things done, felt and said to the contemplation of a
mystery. It is not what is done; it is the revelation
of what lies behind. What is revealed is the element
of fatherhood in all social devotion.
Bloom is almost as lonely in literature as he is in
Dublin, but if there is a kinship it is not with the
tragic and uncontained Bouvard et Pecuchet. He
is distant from them by the whole space of his
scepticism and pessimism. He is cocu, but neither
imaginaire like . the Moor of Venice, nor like the
comic lunatic of the Cocu Magnifique. He has neither
287
 JAMES JOYCE
the authority and the passion of the one, nor the
insane doubt of the other. Seeing that in the actions
he perform& and in the thought� he thinks there is
no malice, no envy, no revenge, no hatred, I place
him, notwithstanding his prudence, his flirtations,
frillies for Raoul and all the rest, in the company of
the pure of heart, as near as a father and a husband
and a lover may be to Uncle Toby.

:i88
 CHAPTER FOURTEEN
"WORK IN PROGRESS"

I LEFT Paris shortly after the publication of Ulysses

and did not return again until some fragments of
Work in Progress-possibly half a dozen-had been
published. One appeared in The Transatlantic
Review, another in Le Navire d'Argent, another in The
Criterion and then began the serial publication in
Transition. 1 read them all and had the advantage
and limitation of reading them alone, Joyce being
in Paris and I in London. Not that I was not
helped by the informative articles that appeared
from time to time in Transition.
Denn bei den alten lieben Toten
Braucht man Erklarung, will man Noten.
Die Neuen glaubt man blank zu verstehen;
Doch ohne Dolmetsch wird's auch nicht gehen.

But however complex the material, whatever the

philosophic basis, two elements leap to the eye of
every reader: Dublin (together with its awkward but
necessary attachment, Ireland) and Joyce himself.
For Joyce, like a true exile, is fast moored to his
native earth with the cable of his memory. He
becomes the more at one with his city in that it
lives in him not he in it. It is an experience universal
and personal like a dream. No gossip column writer
will ever be able to say of him that he is in the Tyrol
or Timbuctoo looking for local colour for his next
book, for whatever the colour and legend of
289
 JAMES JOYCE
London, Paris, Trieste, Zurich, Rome, they must
be baptised in the Liffey and acclimatised in
Dublin before they become available for his art.
This localism is, perhaps, a bigger difficulty for the
reader of Wo rk in Pro gress or Ulysses than the
universality of the theme or the density of the
verbal substance. The reader has his own local
patriotisms and he knows little, unless he is a
Dubliner, of the intimate legend of the town of the
Ford of Hurdles, so that his jealousies are apt to form
a defensive alliance with his ignorance. We are all
Weltkinder these days and rather fancy ourselves
when we find we can worry out a pun or two in any
European dialect we happen to know, and in philo­
sophy we are all willing to be instructed, but when
our local allegiances are challenged we are like
Naaman the Syrian who sought God's saving grace in
the mouth of his prophet but jibbed violently at
washing in the prophet's mouldy little river. Some­
thing in us echoes his proud cry: "Are not Abana
and Pharphar, rivers of Damascus, better than all
the waters of Israel?" But we quickly accept the
Liffey as she tripples and dances through the pages
of Joyce's book. She runs downhill, anyway, just
like our own Thames, Amazon or village brook. And
Dublin, too, we accept, for we know that .Joyce's
city rises, like all cities and villages, at an angle. of
ninety degrees to the neighbouring flood, and is lit
by the same sun, moon, gas and electricity. If we
are sufficiently curious or studious we can quite
em,ily know its history. The really great difficulty
arises when we know all about Clontarf and Con­
nolly. We are then brought up all standing against
Wetherup and there the history book fails us. How
are we to know what ,such and such a car driver
thought about the Duke of Clarence's collars?
The great thing, however, is to plunge in boldly
2go
 J AMES J O YCE
and read as does every successful reader of a foreign
language, and never mind a foreign word or two, for
the infinitely greater part is English. And if it is
English with a difference let us not forget that
English is spoken every day with many differences.
Attic dwellers who ( to the annoyance of the people
underneath, who object to that mumbling noise
going on after midnight) have cultivated the habit
of reading aloud, stand the best chance. Myself an
old mansardist, I had this advantage and further
there came to my mind a few words Joyce let fall in
Zurich. It was about some writer, I forget which,
but one as renowned for the depth of his thought as
for the richness of his language:
"You find him difficult to understand because
his thought is deep and strange," said Joyce. "If
there is any difficulty in reading what I write it is
because of the material I use. In my case the
thought is always simple."
When I am asked (I have been asked) , "Do you
understand all this new book of Joyce's?" I reply
promptly, "No, I don't." But I have read what has
appeared and have experienced many things. Some
things are clear to me and others not. Most of us
might say the same of Goethe's Faust or Shake­
speare's sonnets. And therefore I write as one who
has visited a foreign country not yet on Baedeker's
list-not as an authoritative guide but as a traveller
with sufficient sensibility; sufficient power of obser­
vation to record an impression that may encourage
the adventurous to risk a more extended visit to the
same shores. Anyway, a work of art is given us not
in the first place to be understocd but to be enjoyed,
and Work in Progress can be enjoyed by all who are
equipped with some patience, some sensibility. And
does not all art demand of us these qualities, what­
ever its material? "Signatures of all things I am
291
 JAMES JOYCE

here to read," says Stephen Dedalus as he sets foot

on Sandymount shore. Let us suppose that he has
read them and will make them intelligible to us.
We cannot expect that it shall be clearer than a
nursery rhyme, more intelligible than a dream. We
are warned of our difficulties at the outset:
"For that is what papyr is meed of, made of,
hides and hints and misses in prints. Till we finally
(though not yet endlike) meet with the acquain­
tance of Mister Typus, Mistress Tope and all the
little typtopies. Fillstup. So you need hardly spell
me how every word will be bound over to carry
three score and ten toptypsical readings throughout
the book of Doublends Jined till Daleth, who oped
it, closeth thereof the dor."
The signatures are the present evidence of past
life. To Stephen on the seashore they were sand­
imprisoned stout bottles, pieces of wreckage. But
we carry around with us in the unvisited yet still
populous recesses of our minds signatures of a past
infinitely more remote. From the dawn of life to the
mom�nt in which we live all experience is written
in the structure and function of our bodies-all is
preserved in the depths of our memories. This is
the unknown country into which we are led when
we begin to read Wo rk in Pro gress.
It is as if we were suddenly from normal daylight
taken and plunged into a dark world, but there is
light in the darkness when our eyes become
accustomed to the scene. ''It darkles, all this our
funnominal world," but it is not dark. Shapes of
trees appear before us, bushes, familiar grasses and
thistles, the dark contours of a hill, the expanse of a
plain, a shimmering river, a cloud on high. Light­
ning flashes and a rainbow shines and fades. There
is a city ofliving people with houses and churches all
standing, and a city of the dead with its barrows,
292
 JAMES JOYCE

howes and menhirs and the one seems to be as alive

as the other. There are shadowy shapes of giants,
angels on high and below, a house warmly lit, and
children playing before it. But we must be careful,
for there is a suspicious resemblance. The angels
we saw may be playing at children or the children
we see may have been pretending to be angels.
Stones and treestumps look uncouthly human.
Colour there is as in Aladdin's cave. The things
and beings illumine themselves from within. Big
man father works and waits and busy mother keeps
house, cooking and scouring. But nobody keeps one
size or age for long. Character is the one thing
constant about the beings here. We hear voices
above, below and all round-voices of big people, of
children at lessons and play, obstinate mumbling
of old men, stoney and wooden accents of wood and
stone, loud voices disputing across the river, a trial
with cross examination, special pleading and jury's
verdict, confidential conversations, nursery rhymes,
comic songs, airs from operas, strange animab­
Roamaloose and Rehmoose-nightbirds, thunder
at intervals, the splash of fish in the river.
There is no fixed horizon from which we can
rightly determine the size of the place. We hear a
shape against a background of dark which might
be a black curtain or no space, and then we hear
placenames and catch a glimpse of a waterlogged
plain just where we least expected it, and we know
that all space is there. A house looks small from
without but inside there is no end to it. The time is
the beginning of things, or now, or any time in
between, or all at once. But no one knows the time of
day. It may be "ten O'Connel" and then again
"nobody appeared to have the same time of beard,
some saying by their Oorlog it was Sygstryggs to
nine, more holding with the Ryan wacht it was
2 93
 JAM E S JO Y CE
Dane to pfife." Ifwe stay long enough in a darkened
room we begin to see like cats and owls. Pieces of
furniture arch their backs and threaten us, a coat
on a chair regards us with grisly intentions till we
recognise them for what they are.
The air is not a nipping and an eager air. It is
heavy with sleep. "And low stole o'er the stillness
the heartbeats of &leep." "What was thaas? Fog
was whaas? Too mult sleepth. Let sleepth." The
voices we hear are the unfleshly voices of ghosts.
The giants that stalk abroad are the weightless
phantoms of a dream. But what is happening?
Something important is going on, but we must listen
intently to the noiseless eloquence in "Dinmurk" to
find out what it is. Everything is happening and all
at the same time. There are racial wanderings,
tribal wars, "oystrygods gaggin fishygods!" and
· there is 'a building and rebuilding of cities. The
i:;onflict of good and evil, begun when Michael
hurled Lucifer out of heaven, is continued through
the · ages according to the fixed pattern of the
original event, and the children re-enact it in their
dreams of lessons and play.
"Even so in dreams, perhaps, under some secret
conflict of the midnight sleeper, lighted up to the
consciousness at the time, but darkened to the
memory as soon as all is finished, each several child
of our mysterious race completes for himself the
aboriginal fall.''-DE QUINCEY.
Thus, although the names of places are those of
Dublin city and suburbs (a Dublin' tram and 'bus
guide will give a complete list) the legend is
universal. The persons are few, yet in a sense
they are all who have ever txisted or could
exist.
Two brothers in their . cradles, at their play and
lessons, earning their da,ily bread, making love, are
294
 JAMES JOY CE

all die feindlichen Bruder that have ever been. They

are Michael and Lucifer, Cain and Abel, the
Urizen and Luvah of"Blake's mythology, Wellington
and Napoleon, Jacob and Esau, Brutus and Cassius,
and they might as well be Jack Mastereton and
Jasper Constantinopulos of the serial story synopsis,
or Tommy and Jackey Caffrey quarrellmg about a
ball on Sandymount shore, or the cop and gangster
opposite numbers on the films.
In Wo rk in Pro gress these fatal opposites are named
Shem and Shaun. Shem is Shem the Penman. He
is a poor "acheseyeld from Ailing" and he writes.
Shaun is Shaun the Post. He wends his way to
"Armorica" and makes tons of money. Rivals, they
occupy opposite banks of mother river. As babies
they sleep on opposite sides in their cots in the
paternal house of big man Earwicker. As children
they play opposite each other before the door of the
ho.use. They continue their antagonism as grown
' men and quite naturally Shaun, who comes in
direct line of descent from a skygod, is well in with
the celestial powers, while the heterodox Shem of
opposite stemming just wriggles and twists and
repents his way through the world as best he may.
It is never quite clear how big they are.
\Ve look at them in their cradle and they grow up
to any age before our eyes. "They are to come of
twinning age so soon as they may be born." But it
all seems right when we remember that we are
looking at being not doing, that all that is done is
only that which is. Here is Shaun, at first in his
cradle : "Our bright bull babe Frank Kevin is on
heartsleeveside. Do not you waken him. . He is
happily to sleep with his lifted in blessing like the
blissedAngel he looks so like and his mou is semiope
as though he were blowdelling on a bugigle. By
gorgeous, that boy will blare some knight when he
295
 JAMES JOYCE

will take his dane�s pledges and quit our ingletears

to wend him to Amorica.''
He is the."fine frank fairhaired fellow of the fairy­
tales" and a great eater . . . "while his knives of
hearts made havoc he had recruited his strength by
meals of spadefuls of mounded food constituting his
threepartite meals plus a collation, his breakfast of
first, a bless us O blood and thirsthy orange next the
half of a pint of becon with newled googs, and a
segment of riceplummy padding, met of sunder
suigar and some cold forsaken steak from the bat­
black night o'erflown then came along merendally
his dinner of a half a pound of round steak very rare,
Blong's best from Portarlington's Butchery with a
side of riceypeasy and Corkshire alla mellonge and
bacon with a pair of chops and thrown in from the
silver grid by the proprietoress of the mastery who
lives on the hill and gaulmch gravy and pumper­
nickel to wolp up and a gorger's bulby onion. . . ."
And this is only the half of his meal. But it is all
consumed, "While the loaves are aflowering and the
nachtingale jugs."
Shaun is very dressy and wears his food: " . . a
starspangled zephyr with a decidedly surpliced
crinklydoodle front with his motto for dear life
embrothred_ over it in peas, rice, and yeggyolk, R
for royal, M for Mail, R.M.D. hard cash on the nail
and the most successfully carried gigot turnups now
you ever, breaking over the ankle and hugging the
shoeheel. . . . " What wonder then that he eats his
clothes? " 'You may, ought and welcome,' Shaun
replied, taking at the same time as his hunger got
the bjtter-c;:,f him a hearty bite out of the honey­
comb, of his Braham and MeJm,edible hat. . . ."
When people eat their cldthes and wear their
food it isn't surprising to see the food itself get up
and take a hand in the game.
2 96
 J A M E S JOYCE
"Lady Marmela Shortbred will walk in for
supper with her marchpane switch on, her necklace
of almonds and her poirette Sundae dress with
bracelets of honey and her cochineal hose with
the caramel dancings, .the briskly best from Booties­
town, and her suckingstaff of ivorymint. You
mustn't miss it or you'll be sorry. Charmeuses
chloes, glycering juwells, lydialight fans and puf­
fumed cynarettes. And the Prince Lemonade has
been graciously pleased. His six chocolate pages
will run bugling before him and Cococream toddle
after with his sticksword in a pink cushion."
It seems natural that a man of Shaun's appetite
should be a great favourite with the girls and a great
lad among the boys. He impresses the girls who
gather round him by giving them neatly cut chops
of good advice. . . . "Moral if you can't point a
lily get to henna out of here. Put your swell foot
foremost on foulardy pneumonia shertwaists, irri­
concilible with true feminin risirvition and ribbons
of lace, limenick's disgrace. Sure what is it on the
whole only holes tied together, the merest and trans­
parent washingtones to make Languid Lola's lingery
longer ? Whalebones and busk butts may hurt you
but never lay bare your breast secret to joy Jonas
in the Dolphin's Barncar." But he is overbearing­
ly orotund when as the Mookse he browbeats the
Gripes and he is "sair sullemn and wise chairman­
looking" when, as the Ondt, he views the improvident
antics of the Gracehoper behind the wateringcan.
He wanders through wide open spaces delivering his
letters-it is a kind ofN oman's land or Tom Tiddler's
ground-and he sleeps there on beds of poppies,
dreaming of the girl he left behind him. As a G.P.O.
employee he is singularly lucky. I never had the
opportunity of sleeping while I was on night duty at
St. Martin's le Grand and Mount Pleasant. He is a
29 7
 JAMES J OYCE
go-getter, eloquent, musical, orthodox, combative­
something of a pugilist or a weight lifter.
Shem is a contortionist as supple as resourceful as
Shaun is forceful and muscular. Already in the
cradle his penman's future is present. He lies on
" codliverside" and "has been crying in his
sleep". . . . "You will know him by name in the
capers but you cannot see whose heel he sheepfolds
in his· wrought hand because I have not told it to
you. He will be quite within the pale when he vows
him so tosset to be of the sir Blake tribes bleak. Are
you not somewhat bulgar with your bowels? What­
ever clo you mean with bleak? With pale blake I
write inkhorn. " As playboy Glugg he is "the bold
bad black boy of the storybooks." As Jerry he sits
with brother Kevin, and solves with him a problem
in Euclid physically, geographically and historically.
But there is a full length portrait of Shem ( Transition
No. 7) done with tremendous vitality, and through
this we know him best. Out of the fast moving
stream of words, shapes and colours emerge that
remind us of Stephen Dedalus, but Shem's portrait is
bound by no naturalistic considerations of time or
scale. It is a gigantesque caricature, irresistibly
comic. It begins with his looks. "Shem's bodily
getup, it seems, included an adze of a skull, an
eighth of a larkseye, the whoel of a nose, one numb
arm up a sleeve, fortytwo hairs off his uncrown,
eighteen to his mock lip, a trio of barbels from his
megageg chin, the wrong shoulder higher than the
right, all ears, an artificial tongue with a natural
curl, not a foot to stand on, a handfull of thumbs, a
blind stomach, a deaf heart, a loose liver, two fifths
of two buttocks, one glad stone avoirdupoider , for
him, a manroot of all evil, a salmonkelt's thin skin,
eelsblood in his cold toes a bladder Tristended . . . . "
And then he propounds a riddle to his playmates:
298
 JAMES JOYCE
"When is a man not a man?" He alone knew the
solution: "When he's a sham." There follows in a
score of pages a record of the low shamnesf> of Shem.
His taste in food is low, for he prefers tinned
salmon and tinned pineapple out of"Ananias' cans"
t_o the real article, and instead of drinking good,
honest beer as a man 5hould, he "sobbed himself
wheywhiningly sick on some sort of a rhubarbaros
maundarin yellagreen funkleblue windigut dicdying
applejack squeezed from sour grapefruice," and
pretends when drunk that he could live forever on
the smell of lemonpeel. When any wellwishers tried
to persuade him to abandon his evil courses and pull
himself together, "he would pull a vacant land­
lubber's face, root with earwaker's penf>ile in the
outer of his lauscher and then, lisping, the prattle­
pate parnella, to kill time, and f>watting his deadbest
to think what under the canopies of God would any
decent son of a shedog who had bin to an university
think, begin to tell all the intelligentsia admitted to
that conclamazzione . . . the whole lifelong story
of his entirely low existence. . . . "
While all the world was busy killing or getting
killed for the greatest of principles Shem "corked
himself up tight in his inkbattle house, badly the
worse for boosegas, there to stay for the life, where,
as there was not a moment to be lost, after he had
boxed around with his fortepiano till he was whole
bach and blues, he collapsed carefully under a bed­
tick from Switzer's, his face enveloped into a dead
warrior's telemac, with a whotwaterwottle at his
feet to stoke his energy of waiting, moaning feebly
that his pawdry's purgatory was more than a nigger
bloke could bear, he1niparalysed by all the she­
mozzle (Daily Maily; fullup lace ! Holy Maly,
Mothelup joss!) his cheeks and trousers changing
colour every time a gat croaked." Shem's dwelling
2 99
 JAMES J O Y C E
is described and its interior decoration and furniture
inventoried: "The house O'Shea or O'Shame,
Quivapieno, known as the Haunted Inkbottle no
number Brimstone Walk, Asia in Ireland, as it
was infested with the raps, with his penname SHUT
sepiascraped on the doorplate and a blind of black
sailcloth over its wan phwinshogue, in which he
groped through life at the expense of the taxpayers,
dejected into day and night with jesuit bark and
bitter bite by full and forty Queasianos, every day
in everyone's way more exceeding in violent abuse
of self and others, was the worst, it is hoped, even
in our western playboyish world for pure mouse­
farm filth. . . . "
Ink and paper being denied him by a conspiracy
of publishers, he "made synthetic ink and sensitive
paper for his own end out of his own wit's waste"
and "wrote over every square inch of the only fools­
cap available, his own body . . . . but with each
word that would not pass away the squidself which
he had squirtscreened from the crystalline · world
waned chagreengold and doriangrayer in its dud­
hud." In the end he is denounced by his other self
and himself agrees that the denunciation is just.
The gay, bright voice of Anna Livia, babbling the
cheerful song she has always sung, comforts and
revives him.
Sister Iseult is all the fascinating ingenues trat
ever lived from the girls that were met in the land of
Nod to the latest platinum blonde out of Hollywood.
She dreams of passionate meetings with the beloved
in the park near the river and of wondrous wedding
mornings: "It will all take bloss as oranged at
St. Audiens rosan chocolate chapelry with my
diamants blickfeast after at minne owned hos and
Father blesius Mindelsinn will be beminding hand."
When she talks it is as 1f we heard the voice of a
300
 JAMES JOYCE
more impulsive Gerty MacDowell through a thin
partition. A visitor, tiptoeing into her bedroom and
beholding her maidenhood asleep, divines her in­
most dream: "Would one but to do apart a lilybit
her virginelles and, so, to breath, so, therebetween,
behold, she had instant with her handmadt as to
graps the myth inmid the air. Mother of moth ! I
will to show herword in flesh. Approach not for
ghost sake ! It is dormition!" She is a cloud,
lovely and changeable, born of mountain and river.
She glows with colour, then darkens, wilts and melts
into tears. "She is fading out like Journee's clothes
so you can't see her now. Still we know how Day
the Dyer works, in dims and deeps and dusks and
darks. And among the shades that Eve's now
wearing she'll meet anew fiancy, tryst and trow."
She is the true leapyear daughter of February
filldyke. Born on the 29th, she is always a quarter
of the age of her twenty-eight companions. But
elderly though they are while she is still young the
sister playmates flutter around her with rainbow
colours. They are all gone on Shaun, but they are
very rude to Shem.
The big grownup man, H. C. E. (Here Comes
Everybody) is the most named person in the book.
He is forefather Adam, "the cause of all our
grievances, the whirl the flash and the trouble,"
bearing up as cheerfully as possible under the
blessings of love and work. He is also Noah, builder
of the ark what time "a main chanced to burst and
misflooded his fortune5" and he is a Viking who
conquered and stayed and built a city and bought
and sold and prospered "outreachesly." Some­
times he is man-mountain Mr. Whiteoath, but more
humanly often he is lord of a city and landlord of
an inn where he does big "grossman's bigness."
Joyce's hero has many names. It would take some
30 1
 JA M ES JOY CE
time to count them all. But what practice is more
popular than the giving of nicknames? Every boy
at school is given one or more. Odin had a name
for every function. He was Farmed, Valfather,
Ganglere, Bolverk and many besides according as
he protected seamen, gathered the slain, wandered
in search of wifdom or laboured in Suptung's fields.
We called the spirit of evil Satan in the village
Sunday school and in church they called him also
Beelzebub and Lucifer. When on Sunday after­
noons we looked at the pictures in . Pilgrim's Pro gress
we saw him as fierce javelin-throwing Apollyon,
straddling across the path of Christian. For the
purposes of village conversation he was the devil and
old Nick, but when we played at the back of the
house we co-opted him into the game as old
Gooseberry.
But an offence has been committed against the
park by-laws and H. C. E. is accused. What the
offence was is not quite clear, but we gather
that somebody has to be held "ultimendly respunch­
able for the hubbub caused in Edenborough." . . .
That Viking, as might be expected, keeps a straight
bat against his accusers (his stammer seems to
be put on with a view to gaining time), only his
defence is so complete that most mixed juries
would convict on the spot. It is (a) a complete
alibi-he wasn't there at the time ; (b) in the alterna­
tive the day was hot, he couldn't help it, and the
fault was a venial one; (c) if he committed the
offence complained of, it was so long ago that it
ought to be covered by the statute of limitations.
He reinforces his defence with an eloquent descrip­
tion of all the services he has rendered as builder,
defender and lawgiver of the city.
" . . . I am bubub brought up under a camel act
of dynasties long out of print, the first of Shitric
302
 JAMES JOYCE

Shilkanbeard, but I am known throughout the

world wherever my good Allenglisches Angleslachsen
is spoken by Sall and Will from Augustanus to
Ergastulus, as this is, protested by saints and
sinners eyeeye alike as a cleanliving man and, a1:, a
matter of fact by my halfwife, I think how our
public at large appreciates it most highly from me
that I am as cleanliving as could be and thac my
game was a fair average since I perpetually kept my
ouija ouija wicket up." For lady listeners-in he
broadcast1:, a special appeal to the heart: "Old
Whitehowth is speaking again. Pity poor White­
oath! Dear gone mummeries, goby. Tell the woyld
I have lived true thousand hells. Pity please, lady,
for poor 0. W. in this profoundest snobbin.g I have
caught. Nine dirty years mine age, hairs white
mummery failling deaf as Adder. I askt you dear
lady, to judge on my tree by our fruits."
He reminds the world that he made law and order,
built schools and hospitals, and the land became
thereupon fit for merchants to live in. . . . "Hatten­
tats have mindered, thuggeries are rere as glovers
meeting, lepars lack, iegnerants show beneath
suspieion like the bitterharfs of esculapuloids. All is
waldly bonum�, Aeros, we luft to you! Firebugs,
good blazes ! lubbers, keep your poudies drier!
Seamen, we bless your ship and wives ! Seven ills
havd I habt; seaventy seavens are your prospect.
The chort of Nicholas Within was my guide and I
raised a dom on the bog of Michan. By fineounce I
grew and by grossscruple I grew outreachesly. To
Milud old money, to Madame fresh advances.
Dutch florriners moved against us and I met them
Bartholemew; milreys onfell and I arose Daniel in
Leonden. Who can tell their tale whom I filled ad
lipturn on the plain of soulsbury ? The more
secretly bui built, the more openly plastered. I
303
 J A ME S JOYCE
have reared my hut in the night and at morn I was
encompassed of mushroofs I considered the lilies
on the veldt and unto Balkis did I disclothe mine
glory. This mayde my taughters, and these man
my son, from the vill a ofthe ostmanorum to thostan's
recte Thomars Sraid they are my villeins, with
chartularies I have talledged them."
For his wife, Anna Livia, the big man built
bridges, embankments and lighthom.es, and decor­
ated her banks with churches ". . . and did raft
her Riverworthily and did leftlead her overland the
pace whimpering by Kevin's port and Hurdlesford
and Gardener's mall to Ringsend ferry and there
on wavebrink by mace of masthigh, did I uplift my
magicianer's puntpole and I bade those polly­
fizzyboisterous seas to retire with hemselves from
us . . . and I hung up at Yule my pigmy suns
helphelped of Kettil Flashnose, for the supperhour
of my frigid one, coulomba mea, frimosa mia,
through all Livania's volted ampire from anods to
cathods and from the topazolites of Mourne by
Arklow's sapphire seamanslure and Waterford's
hook and crook lights to the polders of Hy Kinsella
. . . and thirdly for ewigs I did reform and restore
for my smuggy piggiesknees her paddypalace on the
crossknoll and added thereunto a shallow laver to
put out her hellfire and posied windows for her oriel
house and she sass her nach, chillybombom and
forty bonnets, upon the altarstane, may all have
mossyhonours!"
The final boast of Hump the Cheapener, Esq.,
brings loud applause from all the nursing mothers
and other thirsty souls in the world who have found
(who hasn't?) that Guinness is good for diem " . . .
and I planted for my own hot lass a vineyard and
I fenced it about with huge Chesterfield elms and
Kentish hops against lickbudmonth and gleaner-
304
 JAMES JOYCE
month: and (hush ! hm,h !) I brewed for my alpine
plurabelle (l>peakeasy!) my brandold Dublin lindub,
the free, the froh, the frothy freshener, puss pus!!
pussyfoot, to l>plit the spleen of her maw."
Anna Livia i� hil> "alefru," the river of his valley,
his lifepar<ner, mother Eve. She brighten!» his life,
as he lightens hers. She is a happygolucky elderly
lady, forever changing and always the same. Her
life story il> told from l>tart to finish by two washe.r­
women who, when their tale is ended, turn into elm
and stone on her banks. \Ve always know her by the
gay canter of the words. "Lmking one and knocking
the next, tapting a flank and tipting a jutty and
palling in and pietaring out and clyding by on her
eastway." Or, as remembered by one of her sons:
". . . with a beck, with a spring, all her rillringlets
shaking, rocks drops in her tachie, tramtickets in her
hair, all waived to a point and then all inuendat 10n,
little oldfashioned mummy, little wonderful mummy
ducking under bridges, bellhopping the weirs,
dodging by a bit of bog, rapidshooting round the
bends, by Tallaght's green hills, and the pools of the
phooka and a place they call it Blessington and
slipping sly by Sallynoggin, al> happy as the day is
wet, babbling, bubbling, chattering to herself,
deloothering the fields on their elbows leaning with
the 5loothering side of her, giddgaddy, grannyma,
gossipaceus Anna Livia. • . . "
Like most of her sex she spends her youth in
playing and flirting, and her riper years in child­
bearing and cleaning, fetching and carrying. She
seems, however, to be not at all implicated in "this
municipal sin business" which causes her lord so
much anxiety.
Then we meet from time to time and always un­
expectedly four old men who appear suddenly, ·
seemingly from nowhere. But appear is not quite
305
 J A M ES JO Y C E
the word. We hear rather than see them. Their old
voices boom out of the darkne�s like the voices we
hear endlessly repeating the same thing!) in our ear
before we go to sleep. They bring back memories
of the visiting uncles and grandfathers we heard at
the time when we were sent early to bed, voices that
droned us to sleep and waked us an hour later.
These nightmarish old men are accompanied always
by an aged donkey. They are the Big Four with the
Big Noise. Their function seems to be to keep
tradition, search for precedent, to cross-examine;
hold inquests and to censor. Whoever they are­
four provinces of Ireland, the four evangelists, the
fourbottle men, the four winds, the four seasons,
analists, institutions-they are not what would
be generally called nice old men. Their talk is
principally of drink, "Pass the push for Craw's
sake," or of "the good old days not worth remember­
ing." And they are a lecherous lot in a senile
way. Bedridden and "dolled up in their blankets"
they hold the nurse's hand and count up the
mother of pearl buttons on her glove. Feeling
impelled always to imagine a shape at the back of a
voice I lent these somewhat terrifying beings what I
thought were appropriate bcdies but I found that
I had first borrowed the forms from William Blake.
They forced me to conjure up a vision of human
forms similar to those of the inhumanly ancient
men in Blake's drawings. But with this difference.
Blake's old men are majestic and venerable beings
whereas the four old men in Joyce's book, whether
they sit on their hams under their "sycomores,"
playing on banjos, or grope their way through skyey
fields in search of the sleeping Shaun, are always
greedy, censorious and malicious.
Another group personality is the twelve whose
presence is always announced by long words ending
306 .
 JAMES JO Y CE
in 'ation: "There was a koros of drouthdropping
surfacemen, boomslanging and plugchewing, fruit­
eyeing and flowerfeeding, in cont,emplation of the
fluctuation and the und1fication of her filimenta­
tion. . . . " Again they are a jury empanelled,
evidently in the difficult case of Rex V. Earwicker
" . . . whereas by reverend um they found him
guilty of their and those imputations of fornicopula­
tion with two of his albowcrural correlations . . .
summing him up to be done, be what will of excess
his exaltation, still we think with Sully there can be
no right extinuation for contravention of common
and statute legislation, for which the fit remedy
resides for Mr. Sul ry in corporal amputation so three
month5 for GubbsJ eroboam, tne frothwhiskered pest
of the park. . . . " They are also "a band of twelve
mercenaries, the Sullivani," and later or earlier, as
the case may be, they are "a bundle of a dozen
representative locomotive civics inn quest of outings,"
all sitting wug with their conversations in the big
man's inn, just to show there is no ill feeling. They
seem to be intelligent and rightminded citizens and
in spite of their oath as jurymen not at all censorious.
As an offset to these honest citizens are two ( or is
it three?) soldiers who happened to be there or
thereabouts when the breach of the park regulations
took place. They hail from within sound of Bow
Belh, and this is their hazy account of the matter:
"Hiss ! Which we had only our hazelight to see
with in our point of view me and my auxy, Jimmy
d' Arey, hadn't we, Jimmy ?-who to seen with ?
Kiss ! No kidding which he stood us first a couple of
Mountjoys and nutty woodbines with hi5 cadbully's
choculars in the snug at the Cambridge arms of
Teddy Ales while we was laying was he 5tepmarm
or a Vvouldower, which he said a taking off his
Whitby hat and wishing his long life's strength to
30 7
 JAMES JOYCE
our allhallowed king. . . . Touching our Phrenix
Rangers' nuisance, the daintylines, and those pest
of parkies, twitch, thistle ar:d cha·r lock, were they
for giving up their fogging trespa!:>!:>es by order which
we foregathered he must be raw in cane sugar, the
party, no, Jimmy MacCawthelock? Who trespass
against me? Briss ! That's him wiv his wig on,
achewing of his maple gum, that's our grainpopaw
Mister Beardall, an accompliced burgomaster,
which he told us privates out of hi!:> own scented
mouf he used to was afore this wineact come, what
say, our Jimmy the chapelgoer?-\Vho fears all
masters ! Hi, Jocko Nowlong, my own sweet boosy
love, which he puts his feeler to me behind the
beggars' bush does Freda, don't you be an emugee.
We must spy a half a hind on honeysuckler now
his old face's hardalone wiv his defences down
during his wappin stillstand, says my Fred, and
Jamessime here which, pip it, she simply must, she
s_ay!:>, she'll do a retroussy from her point of view
(Way you fly ! Like a frush !) to keep her flouncies
off the grass while paying the wetmenots a music­
hall visit and pair her fiefighs fore him after his
corkine!'>s lay up two bottles of joy with a sl: andy
had by Fred and afino oloroso which he was warming
to, my right, Jimmy, my old brown freer?" These
privates are the only direct witnesses against
H. C. E. but their testimony is of no value because,
(a) they couldn't see properly, partly on account of
the bushes and partly on account of the "hazelight" ;
(b) they have been drinking heavily; (c) they are
friends of the accused who, in his privileged position
as burgomaster and landlord of a pub, has been
standing them drinks and smokes . To put it
bluntly, they have been got at by H. C. E. How­
ever, the thil).g got round, for one of these privates,
or some similar person, blabbed the whole story
308
 JAMES JOYCE

·'alcoherently" while talking in his drunken sleep

in a dosshouse, and it came to the ears of Hosty, a
down and out poet who was prowling dejectedly
around, "devising ways and manners of means, of
somehow or other getting a hold of some chap's
parabellum in the hope of tak_ing a tuppence sociable
and lighting upon a dive somewhere off the Dullkey
Downlairy and Bleakrooky tramaline where he
could go and blow the sibicidal napper off himself
in peace and quietude." And Hosty worked the
material up into a ballad.
Completmg the household of Earwicker are his
aboriginal man-of-all-work and maid-of-all-work,
Joe and Dinah or Knut and Kate or whatever they
may be called. Not in the city, but not far from its
walls, strange shapes of wood. and stone arise to tell
us the story of the place. Such are Mutt and Jute
who "swop hats and excheck a few strong verbs
weak oach eather yapyazzard abast the blooty
creeks" in the manner of slapstick musichall
comedians until they fade into the �andscape at the
coming of "the giant Forficules with Amni the fay."
Of the same family are the two garrulous washer­
women who gossip the tale of Anna Livia from the
unknown nook where she was born to the city she
drudges for, and thence to the sea into which she
flows. Night falls and the two gossips are rooted in
the earth as elm and stone again.
Rathfarnham, Finglas, Howth Head and Lucan:
the stage is small, yet big enough. Roman history
can be enacted in the courtyard of an inn. A,:; will
be seen from its frequent mention, Chapelizod, a
little village just outside Dublin, is the centre of the
action. This is the microcosm in which the macro­
cosm of Joyce's universe finds a shape and a home.
Phrenix Park lies behind it, the Liffey runs through
it, the villages of Lucan, Fox and Geese, Island
3 09
 J AME S J OYCE

Bridge are its near neighbours. It is a small place.

If a motor-coach full of tourists drove through it the
man with the megaphone would just have time to
turn and tell the people that Alfred Harmsworth
was born there, and the village would be left behind.
Its name proclaims its association with the legend of
Yseult. Sheridan Lefanu has celebrated Chapelizod
in his delightful novel, The Ho use by the Chtirclryard.
Of its "stalworth elm" he writes: "Thou hast a story
to tell, thou slighted and solitary sage, if only the
winds would steal it musically forth." In Wo rk in
Pro gress it tells the story of the river. And of the
Liffey the romantic Devereux says to his beloved:
"Look at the river-is not it feminine? It's sad and
it's merry, musical, sparkling and oh, so deep!
Always changing, yet still the same. 'Twill show
you the trees, or the clouds, or yourself, or the stars."
Anna Livia there is truly but "a judyqueen, not
up to your elb." It should be possible for an Olym­
pic polejumper, with the permission ofMr. Platts, the
manager of the distillery, to take off from the
distillery grounds on the north side, overleap the
Liffey and land on the south bank, dryfoot, in
Mr. Malone's garden. So much for width, but as
for length a Dublin friend assures me that a good
walker could start from Grattan Bridge early
morning, walk across the chord of her arc to her
source and return to his starting place on the same
day. An atmosphere, sweet and glad, hangs over the
river at Chapelizod. In slow mood or swift there is
nothing terrible in her as sometimes there is in her
fiercer sisters. Salmon of the family of Tuan Mac­
Cairll or Fionn MacCumhal or fin made cool still
jump and splash in her waters, and the human
children of Tuan or Fionn or fin live on her banks.
Alljoyce's elemental shapes are there. I painted a
picture on the south side of the river, east of the
310
 JAMES JOYCE
b ridge and in front of a row of cottages-Cop- .
pinger's, perhaps. Shem arid Shaun and a murmura­
tion of Maggies gathered round me to criticise and
admire. Soon on some question of precedence . I
heard a dispute. Shaun advised brother Shem, in
t_he language of the films, to "scram"and "beat it,"
and Shem was banished accordingly. The Maggies
I knew "war loving, they love laughing," yet when
I heard Doreen laughing more than the others I
wanted to know what she was laughing at. She
wouldn't tell me so I asked Violet, who, after much
persuasion, said in a rich Dublin brogue, "It's
because you talk so funny." When it began to
"darkle'' I adjourned to the Mullingar Inn. Saw­
dust was strewn in "expectoration" and a quorum
of "representative civics" already assembled to
"drain the mead for misery to incur intoxication."
The subject of their "conflingent controversies . of
differentiation" was the Irish Grand National.
Mr. Keenan, blond, burly, affable, authoritative
and bright-eyed, entertained us in his custom­
house. He was called away, and in his c1,bsence
an amiable lady served us with pints. I met no four
old men, cantankerous and censorious, but then one
always has the feeling that they come in at times
from more distant parts. And I did not gain an
insight into this "sin business" as I was not able to
go into the park in the hazelight. But here, in the
space of a few hours, and in their own locality, I
made acquaintance with many of the elements of
Work in Progress-river, hill, forest, human habita­
tions, laughing girls, brothers in conflict, citizens in
couucil, a woman serving and a big man presiding.
The whole story is conveyed in echoes of nursery
rhymes, play rhymes, popular songs, catchwords,
sentimental ballads and operatic airs, all mixed
through near relationship with religion and history.
31I
 JAMES J OYCE

And then there are school lessons, endlessly re­

peated, like games, by generation after generation
of children. The Norseman's original chaos,
Ginungagap, and his last day, Ragnarok, occur in
all variations, and his gods, Odin, Thor and Loki,
fraternise easily with their Christian colloogues.
They have forgotten their old feuds and have
become good mixers. Songs and nursery rhymes
have become religious invocations, and the gods
have become housemall and enter easily the
habitations of man.
It. is characteristic of Joyce that he uses for his
purpose all handy devices and limits his choice of
means with no doctrine. In modifying the shapes
and sounds of his words he has but followed popular
usage. It is not a new practice sacred to a clique and
there is nothing particularly highbrow in it. The
pun is as popular now as it was in Elizabethan days.
Joyce uses it and all its tribe of double meanings­
rhyming slang, malapropisms, spoonerisms, back­
slang-just as it suits him, and to all this inherited
machinery of wit and expression he adds devices of
his own. When the Cockney is surprised and
incredulous and says, "\Vould you Adam and Eve
it?" he slyly spreads his unbelief so as to cast a
shadow of doubt on the story of creation in the first
·book of Genesis. "Andthisandthis" is good rhyming
slang in the mouth of a drunk for antithesis. "This
ourth of years"-"The residence of our lives,"
spoonerism, malapropism. The puns run sentence
wide and are amazing in their point and ingenuity.
"With harm and aches till Father alters." "The
hornmade ivory dreams you reved of the flushpots
of Euston and the hanging garments of Maryle­
b.one." Runaway Shem is a "fuyerescaper." House­
father calls "enthreateningly." One of the n19st
effective of Joyce's inventions consists in exaggerat-
312
 JAMES JOY C E
ing the essential expression of a word and so stressing
its descriptive gesture. He does it in Ulysses with
"lovelorn longlost lugubru Booloohoom. ' ' On the
same principle thunder-fearing children in Wo rk in
Pro gress say their prayers to the "Loud," making
themselves pitifully small before him with a series of
long ees. "Oh Loud hear the wee beseech of thees
of each of these thy unlitten ones !" Then there is
the magnifying ofsome natural phenomenon through
an alteration, however slight, of the fixed forms of
the words, to give a magical sense of dream time.
" Countlessness of livestories have netherfallen by
this plage, flick as flowflakes, litters from aloft, like
a waast wizzard all of whirlworlds." And we are
always to remember that this is the speech of beings
who are of our world but not in it. To this add
numberless inventions where the word is a picture of
the thing-the "sputing and tussing" of sick and
sorry Shem, the "smuttering of apes," the "frantling
of peacocks," etc. But this is no more than a con­
tinuation of the work of the builders of our speech.
There has always been a language of expression
and a language of communication-�:me for building
Bush House and the other for building that Tower
of Babel which is poetry-so that the question, often
asked, "Why doesn't Joyce use the words we know,
and put them in a familiar order?" is superfluous, or
can be answered by asking another. Could any
paraphrase of a Shakespeare sonnet convey its
beauty, and if it failed to convey the beauty would
the meaning be there? Let the doubter try:
The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured,
And the sad augurs mock their own presage;
Incertainties now crown themselves assured,
And peace proclaims olives of endless age.
The wonderful night piece at the end of Anna Livia
Plurabelle is already familiar, but let the reader,
313
 J AME S JOYCE

sensitive to th,e magic of the following passages, ask

himself if that magic would not disappear if the
material that conveys it were altered in any way.
"Yet he made leave to many a door beside of
Finglas wold for so witness his chambered cairns
silent that are at browse up hill and down coombe
and on eolithostroton, at Howth or at Coolock or
even at Enniskerry. Olivers lambs we do call them
and they shall be gathered unto him, their herd and
paladin, in that day hwen he skall wake from
earthsleep in his valle ofbriers and o'er dun and dale
the Wulverulverlord (protect us ! ) his mighty horn
skall roll, orland, roll.
"Liverpoor? Sot a bit of it ! His braynes coolt
parritch, his pelt nassy, his heart's adrone, his
bluidstreams acrawl, his puff but a piff, his
extremeties . extremely so Humph is in his doge.
Words weigh no more to him than raindrip� to
Rethfernhim. Which we all like. Rain. When we
sleep. Drops. But wait until our sleeping. Drain.
Sdops."
Or: ". . . Nought stirs in spinney. The swayful
pathways of the dragonfly spider stay still in
reedery. Quiet takes back her folded fields. In
deerhaven, imbraced, alleged, injoynted and un­
latched, the birds, tommelise too, quail silent. Was
avond ere a while. Now conticinium. The time of
lying together will come and the wildering of the
nicht till cockeedoodle aubens Aurore. No chare of
beagles, frantling of peacocks, no muzzing of the
camel, smuttering of apes. Lights, pageboy, lights !
When otter leaps in outer parts then Yul remember
Mei. Her hung maid mohns are bluming, look, to
greet those loes on coast ofamethyst ; arcglow's seafire
siemens lure and warnerforth's hookercrookers."
There are stranger things in Work in Progress than
the words out ofwhich it is made. That which con-
314
 JAM E S JOY C E
tinually astonishes me is its constant and even
gaiety. "Loud, heap miseries upon us yet entwine
our arts with laughters low!" might be the prayer
of the writer as well as that of the children sheltering
under the big man's roof. All the characters in the
book seem to have read, marked, learned and in­
wardly digested universal history; that is to say,
read it at a glance, marked it with their thumb­
marks, learned it from back to front and digested it
while sleeping. When they have it properly in their
bloodstream they play it. They re-enact it "every
evening at lighting up o'clock sharp in Feenichts
Playhouse." Most of us, when we look back at
history, see either a brave pageant or a tragic and
painful spectacle, full of crudty, treachery and
stupidity, justifiable because it was inevitable,
tolerable because we believe it is leading some­
where, and excusable because something in us tells
us we are responsible for it all and that in any case
we can do no better ourselves. Stephen Dedalus
thought history a nightmare: here it is a dream­
at once an essence of and a commentary on life. It
is a deathdream or dreamdeath where the shades
of all the makers of Ireland walk as in some more
familiar Elysian fields. Whether it is "ten O' Connel"
or "Sygstryggs to nine" is of no consequence where
no time is. But if this is history, where are the
tears? These phantoms seem to have the innocence
of the unborn and the wisdom of the dead. They
play eternally as Odin's chosen warriors played in
Valhalla, slaying one another where no death was
and reassembling themselves sociably around the
festive board to eat the imperishable flesh of the
sodden sow and drink immortal mead. These are
night thoughts but there is neither gloom nor fear
nor anguish in them. They fly the lighter for being
tethered to no deathdreading avoirdupois.
315
 JAMES J O Y CE
Chuff "wrestles with the bold bad black boy
Glugg geminally about caps or something until they
adumbrace a pattern of somebody else or other."
They just go indoors after that to be washed and
scrubbed by mother. Bad boy Shem, on his beam­
ends with the bellyache, wonders what his muffin­
stuffinaches are all about and concludes that it is:
"Breath and bother and whatarcurss. Then breath
more bother and more whatarcurss. Then no breath
no bother but worrworums." The rivalry of these
boys (there is no doubt in this world and therefore
no jealousy) supplies all the conflict there is; but the
brothers are as necessary to each other as points of
the compass or complementary colours. If there
were no Lucifer, Michael's occupation would be
gone, and without the assistance of Michael from
behind Lucifer would never reign with trident and
flames over his own proper kingdom. Anna Livia,
singing and dancing, is always as happy as the day
is long and H. C. E. gets on with his civic and family
affairs not unduly perturbed by this "sin business."
Whether she is preparing for her wedding "blick­
feast" or sitting "glooming so gleaming in the
gloaming," Iseult enjoys her moods of all maids.
The four senators, the twelve civics, the servants and
soldiers, the sticks and stones, all glitter with their
own peculiar serious humour. The play in the
Feenichts Playhouse is presented "With battle
pictures and the Pageant of History worked up by
Messrs. Thud and blunder. Promptings by Elanio
Vitale. Longshots, upcloses, outblacks and stage­
tolets by Hexenschm.s, Coachmaher, Incubone and
Rocknarrag. " How mysteriously friendly these
otherwise dreadful agencies become when their
names are adapted for the purpose of this scene !
They are mistaken who imagine that there is a gap
in the production ofJoyce at any point. His work is
316
 JAMES JOYCE
all of a piece. The form changes but the substance
remains the same-the fixed vision of the world as
a whole, the hard, cool logic, the humour, boister­
ous or impish, the personal experiences, become for
him symbolic, the preoccupation with the mystery
of the word. From Stephen reflecting on the football
field at Clongowes that a belt was a belt, "And a
belt was also to give a fellow a belt," hearing water
and things speak for themselves, and on Sandy­
mount shore translating their noises and material
into human speech, to the verbal mysteries and
innovations of Work in Progress is but a step and a step
and then a step. Joyce saw life in Ulysses much as
an atomic chemist sees the world, as a thing of
myriad forms but few elements, and the same holds
good of Work in Progress. In the latter work, how­
ever, the view is coloured with a spirit of happy
reconciliation. The exile is still there but the pathos
of banishment is absent. And Bloom's pessimism
(he turns from his own brief life to the aged and still
young stars) gives place to the genial assurance of
the active and beneficent Phoenician-Scandinavian
cityfounder, H. C. E., who is awed neither by the
apathy nor by the long life of the stars. He is as old
and as young as they. The sullen conflict of
Stephen with his contemporaries is reconciled in the
unity of the twin brothers Shem and Shaun.
The landscape plays a part in Work in Progress it
never played in U!ys,<f!s, and that not as a passive
space but as an active force. Dublin was made by the
might of mountain and the quickness of water, and
the genii who created the city haunt the neighbour­
hood. Stephen says of his barbarian ancestors
"Their blood is in me, their lusts my waves." But
he abhors history as a nightmare. It would drain the
blood of the living for a useless sacrifice to the dead.
Yet when he descends into it in the night he finds it
317
 J A M ES JOY CE

is peopled with friendly shades. Strangely enough

they are all parts of himself.
I never heard Joyce pretend to be a Blake adept,
but I knew that he was familiar with the interpreta­
tions of Blakean mysteries of Yeats and his circle.
In his later years in Dublin Joyce lived in that
philosophy which maintains that on the borders of
our individual memory lies the memory of our race,
that outside the frontiers of the individual mind lies
the universal mind, and that with the "open
Sesame'' of symbols (words or things) the individual
mind may be made a partaker of that vaster racial
experience. It is an interesting fact that of the two
lectures delivered by Joyce in the Universita del
Popolo in Trieste one was on Blake an,d the other on
Defoe. But if Joyce at one time steeped himself in
Blake he never accepted the Blakean or any other
ready-made symbols. In Wo rk in Pro gress he creates
his own, and thes·e are intentionally trivial in the
original, literal sense of the word. We are led by
three ways to a place where the ways of departure
are also three. There are, however, similarities,
striking enough, between the Londoner and the
Dubliner. Each aims at summing up the elements
of human experience, at presenting a picture of the
world as complete, having in view its changes of
time and substance-the evolution of things. To this
end they both work with words as symbols, and
create a mythology to represent the elemental
shapes and forces of the universe. Each has a native
town with its surroundings which supplies a
mystical place wherein the universal legend may be
enacted. In the case of Blake that place is London ;
in that of Joyce, Dublin.
Both Blake and Joyce have a passion for locality,
but Joyce has with that passion a painter's love of
the natural scene in colour, tone, space, whereas
318
 JAMES JOYCE
Blake is graphically abstract and delimiting. The
grace, the glitter, the elegance of the Liffey land­
scape shine out in Work in Progress, but no line in
Jerusalem creates for us a vision of London's mighty
tidal drudge. They seem nearest to each other in
their love of place names. The names Lambeth,
"Isle of Leutha's Dogs," Muswell Hill, "mournful,
ever-weeping Paddington," as distinct from the
places they designate, meant to Blake what Howth,
Chapelizod and Lucan mean to Joyce, but we do
get a vision of the actual pleasant places when we
read Joyce, and of the people who inhabit them,
whereas the place names in Blake are abstractions
only. The place names in Jerusalem are like the
names of the stations on the old London Under­
ground. They appear, written in big letters,
through a cloud of sulphurous steam, and to the
accompaniment of clanging metal. Joyce does not
help out his place names with names invented for
their suggestiveness in sound. There is in Work in
Progress no Entuthon Benython, no Golgonooza, no
Udan Adan. As far as he goes is to deform, accord­
ing to what he desires to express, the names of
existing places. Lucalizod, for example, Lucan and
Chapelizod fused together, may be regarded as the
world, for the world, in principle, is no more than
two or more villages united.
Blake tells us of the forces that made the world.
They are creative elements for ever forging and
building, groaning and howling. Whatever they
are, they are not human. His material is a loud,
monotonous recitative. A whole population of
elemental beings appears in Vala or Jerusalem, but
they all talk with the same voice. Joyce deals with
elemental shapes rather than elemental forces.
Things are. They are not in a state of clamorous
and painful becoming. And joyce's material has all
319
 J A. MES JO Y CE
the grace of an opera with its balance of orchestra,
aria and recitative, different male and female
voices and chorus. The girls in Work in Progress talk
with the voices and accent of girls, the boys with
boys' voices, and when the men talk thev talk like
men, young, middle-aged or old; and the ·observant
soldiers discuss the Big Man's frailties and hospitali­
ties as good soldiers should.
Blake invents a whole mythology with which to
explain his world. Joyce shows the world (he does
not explain it) in the world's own terms, its own
living shapes. He takes history as present. It is now,
in front of us. That which lay nacheinander in time
he translates, in the manner of a weaver of tapestries,
into the nebeneinander before our eyes. Whatever
Blake's ancestry, he was born a Londoner, and he
has all the fu ry of conviction of a religious revivalist.
He wants his readers to do something, to believe
something, to worship something. Joyce but asks
us to contemplate something. His is not a revelation,
a religion, a doctrine, but a picture. It is a picture of
the elemental shapes of man's mind as they appear to
him after prolonged contemplation of mankind in
its minute particulars. The multitudes of natural
shapes resolve themselves into a few elemental
shapes, and for him history repeats itself to infinity.
And he has made his picture with material regarded
as trivialjust as he made Ulysses, the epic of the body,
out of material regarded as unworthy or, sometimes,
ignoble. But as the history of our planet is written
in the pebble we kick in walking, so may the history
of our race lie, living but not manifest, in common
words and habitual gestures. They are the body to
the outline of history. It has, from time to time,
seemed strange to me that a generation that has
fully accepted Blake ( finding him therefore, presum­
ably, comprehensible) should quarrel with Joyce on
the score of incomprehensibility.
OT H E R W R I T I N G S
 JOYCE' S CHAPTERS OF
G O I N G F O R T H B Y DAY

I t is important to keep clear of labels. Joyce's aesthetic creed was

made by himself for himself, and it will be hard to see him as a
follower or hail him as a leader of any school. If any device lay
handy in the free-for-all communal workshop, he was quite willing
to make use of it with thanks to the inventor (as in the case of the
paro le interieure) but always as the larron impenitent. If you saw Joyce
in the company of any doctrinaire you might be sure the association
would end at the next crossroads. It is truer of Joyce than of most
writers to say that his books grew out of his own life, and it follows
that their origins lie in the vital circumstances out of which they
arose. Looking for these is like looking for the source of a river and
finding a tangle of a dozen springs and rills which have to serve our
practical purpose, for if we looked any farther we should come to the
sky and sea, source of all rivers.
Leopold Bloom in Ulysses has several dozy moments in the course
of his day's wandering, and Joyce presents these with uncanny skill.
A dream of the night before haunts him throughout the day till he
drops off to sleep, leaving his bigger and better half to her famous
monologue which 'turns slowly, evenly, though with variations,
capriciously, but surely like the huge earthball itself round and round
spinning.' After that day whose presentation had taken him the
greater part of a decade Joyce must have found himself staring
questioningly at the mysterious night.
For about half the time that it took to compose Ulysses Joyce lived
in Zurich, at that time the second capital of psychoanalysis. Joyce
preferred butter as a subject of conversation, and talk about dreams
and the subconscious was likely to drive him to a bored silence or to
a Ma che f of impatience. But there it was. You might call the sub­
ject a nightmare or a mare's nest, love it or detest it; it was like the
Fohn wind : you couldn't escape it.
Einstein's theory of the universe was becoming common property,
and to another group of explorers the atom was yielding up its
 JAMES JOYCE
secrets. The airplane was flying over national frontiers with mes­
sages of all kinds. Wireless waves we� carrying nimble thought at
its own proper speed over land and sea, while contrary agencies
were intensifying national consciousness and bringing into being
national self-sufficiencies. The .forward and outward drive was
matched by a passionate nostalgia which led us backward and in­
ward to legends and to all other evidences of our beginnings.
During my stay in Switzerland I kept for my own amusement a
record of my dreams. I showed this to Joyce, together with a poem
I called 'At the Gates of Sleep', and, at the same time, discussed with
him my difficulties in recording dreams. I had cultivated the mem­
ory necessary for the dream happenings, but in s�tting them down
on paper the whole atmosphere-the essential experience-was lost.
I found this atmosphere to be incommunicable with any means I
knew. If these conversations were remembered (and Joyce was not a
man who forgot a great deal) , it is possible that they arose later as a
provocation to the master craftsman in Joyce.
Joyce was a cosmopolitan wanderer, sensitive to the intellectual
climate of the places and times he lived in. He refused the servitude
implicit in the acceptance of any one influence, but in the accept­
ance of many he could remain free. There's safety in numbers. I
indicate but a few of these. Every reader of Finnegans Wake will per­
ceive as many more. Joyce himself can hardly have known them all,
whence they came, or how he assigned them their place and func­
tion. But, when the lightning flash of inspiration showed him the
night mind of man as his province, there lay all the material of life,
of his own and past ages, awaiting only to be baptized in the Liffey
to be made suitable for his creative purpose.
Finnegans Wake is a resurrection myth. A river is a symbol of life
and of that perpetual resurrection which is life. She is just as old as
she is young, and just as young as she is old. While she is being born
of her mother, the sky, in the Wicklow hills, she is being received in
the arms of her father ocean in Dublin Bay. She renews herself
constantly by a 'commodious vicus of recirculation' . The human
race does the same whether regarded as a whole or in its parts as
tribes, cities, or nations. The resurrection motive is announced on
the first page of Finnegans Wake and is repeated with variations
throughout the book.
 G O I N G F O RT H B Y DAY
The oaks of ald now they lie in peat yet elms leap where askes
lay. Phall if you but will, rise you must : and none so soon either
shall the pharce,for the nunce come to a setdown secular phoenish.
The house of Atreox is fallen indeedust (Ilyam, Ilyum !
Maeromor Mournomates !) averging on blight like the mundi­
banks of Fennyana, but deeds bounds going arise again. Life, he
himself said once, (his biografiend, in fact, kills him verysoon, if
yet not, after) is a wake, livit or krikit, and on the bunk of our
breadwinning lies the cropse of our seedfather, a phrase which
the establisher of the world by law might pretinately write across
the chestfront of all manorwombanborn.
And then. Be old. The next thing is. We are once amore as
babes awondering in a wold made fresh where with the hen in the
storyaboot we start from scratch.
Yet is no body present here which was not there before. Only
is order othered. Nought is nulled. Fuitfiat!
. . . receives through a portal vein the dialytically separated
elements of precedent decomposition for the verypet purpose of
subsequent recombination. . . .

'Bygmester Finnegan, of the Stuttering Hand,' was a builder who

liked a drop of drink, and while he was working on a wall 'of a trying
thirstay mournin' he didn't feel quite himself. 'His howd feeled
heavy, his hoddit did shake.' He slipped and fell from his ladder,
and they found him dead on the ground. They took him home,
wrapped him in a nice clean sheet, put him on the bed, and called
all the neighbours and a whole lot of his fellow tradesmen in to the
wake. 'And the all gianed in with the shoutmost shoviality. Agog
and Magog and the round of them agrog.' The drinks were going
round, there ':Vas dancing on the floor and altogether 'grand fun­
ferall', but a row started, a bottle was thrown, and some of the spirits
fell on the sleeping giant, who, at the smell, taste, and touch of the
lifewater he loved, becomes Finnegan again, sits up, casts off his
grave clothes, and joins in the fun.

Whack. Huroo. Take your partners.

On the floor your ankles shake.
Isn't it the truth I've told you,
Lots of fun at Finnegan's wake ?
 JAMES JOYCE
'There are plenty of other versions of the resurrection story,' said
Joyce, 'but this was the most suitable to my purpose.' The music­
hall ditty serves as leitmotiv and signature tune introducing the
giant city-founder Finn MacCool. The cosmic viewpoint and the
comic muse are old associates, but the presence of lyric inspiration in.
the alliance is rarer, perhaps unique, yet here they are in organic
union in Finnegans Wake. I believe it was Joyce's aim to include
every genre of poetic composition in his book. I well remember him
telling me with pleasure that his friend, James Stephens, had found
all poetic elements blended in what at that time was called Work in
Progress. Comic the book certainly is, and certainly serious though
never solemn. 'Loud, heap miseries upon us yet entwine our arts· '
with laughters low.' If you laughed at the comic in Finnegans Wake
Joyce was pleased, but if you missed the hidden serious he was apt to
be reproachful, as he was, mildly, when I failed to see more than the
fun of the thing in the dialogue in pidgin English and Nippon
English between the archdruid and St. Patrick in Part IV.
Much more is intended in the colloquy between Berkeley the
arch druid and his pidgin speech and Patrick the arch priest and
his Nippon English. It is also the defence and indictment of the
book itself, B's theory of colours and Patrick's practical solution of
the problem. Hence the phrase in the preceding Mutt and Jeff
banter 'Dies is Dorminus master' = Deus est Dominus noster
plus the day is Lord over sleep, i.e. when it days.
But nobody .is likely to deny the seriousness of Finnegans Wake (for
what claims to be universal cannot be less) , and it shall be left to
others to define the poetic territory it covers. But what oflife ? I felt
as I was reading through Finnegans Wake in its final form for the first
time that for all its universality an essential element of life had been
left out of it-the element of pain and death, nor does this element
appear until the final pages. But the reason soon appears. From
'lighting up o'clock sharp' till sunrise, Finn and his family live as
timeless phantoms in a world where life and death, youth and age,
birth and corruption, and all extremes meet, that middle kingdom,
that limbo of sleep and dreams where Death's brother entertains his
subjects with the pageant of history without tears-all ambiguities,
anachronisms, and incongruities-presented by his pageant masters,
'Messrs Thud and Blunder.' The story of the pageant is the found-
 G O I N G F O RT H B Y DAY
ing and perpetual re-creation of the city of Dublin-the city of Finn
MacCool.
The worst of writing aboutFinnegans Wake is that all our words are
wrong. Story is wrong, of course, for a story is one thing happening
after another along a one-way time street, coming from and going to
some place, whereasFinnegans Wake is going nowhere in all directions
on an every-way roundabout with infiltrations from above and
below. On every page Joyce insists on this all-time dream-time by
every device of suggestion and allusion and by a continual modifica­
tion and cancellation of all-time words. For example : 'It stays in
book of that which is. I have heard anyone tell it jesterday (master
currier with brassard was't) how one should come on morrow here
but it is never here that one today. Well but remind to think, you
where yestoday Ys Morganas war and that it is always tomorrow in
toth's tother's place. Amen.'
And sometimes a confidential voice seems to talk 'straight turkey'
to us with all the air of imparting historical information, but so
numerous are the asides, and so tightly packed the ghostly narrative
with parentheses, that when the confidential narrator comes to a full
stop we find ourselves in possession of a multitude of hints and
suggestions but of no story at all. Instead of a story of happenings, a
contour or an accent is added to the picture of one or other of his
personages, or the place in which they live is lit with a new light. If
we go back to where we started and try to unravel the phantom
tissue clause by clause, the whole fabric falls to pieces. The effort is
like trying to put salt on birds' tails or juggle with live eels. Here
and there a 'Fuit' or 'Fiat' or 'Fiatfuit' warns us that we are in a
world of essences where there is constant change but no growth and
no development, no time sequence, and consequently no story.
Nevertheless, far from that calm storm centre where the people of
Finnegans Wake lie asleep, the world is spinning towards another
sunrise.
We find ourselves obliged to leave that one-way route which
compels us to think of a giant Finn who lived once upon a time,
founded a city, and then died, and was succeeded by a lot of differ­
ent people until the story begins when he is represented by the burly
publican of an inn on the road to Mullingar. As an aid to adapting
my own mind to the pattern or plot ofFinnegans Wake, I have found
 JAMES JOYCE
it useful to look on the book rather as a picture. A painter friend of
mine owns one painted by a Flemish artist representing the war in
heaven, the creation, temptation, fall, expulsion, and first murder
lying side by side in one composition. The one or other of the many
actions may be looked at apart or taken in forward or backward
sequence, or all may be seen together as one simultaneous whole.
But Joyce with his own material can do what no painter can do
within the limits of colour and a flat surface. The Futurists tried it
and failed. He can build up his picture out of many superimposed
planes of time, so that any one of his persons can give any number of
impersonations. It is as if we looked at a picture of, say, Gog and
Magog, master builders, and without changing their identity or
position they became Dr. Magog laying down the law to his friend
Mr. Gog, or young Gog and his clever Mog, or Prime Minister
Magog receiving his union ticket from Bricklayers' President Gog
and being told to get hold of some tools and finish the job.
Bound up with the dream time ofJoyce's book is the dream lan­
guage. I have already quoted a saying ofjoyce's (evidently a prac­
tised hand-off for a straight tackler) , 'Yes, there are enough words
in the Oxford Dictionary, but they are not the right ones.' Why are
they not the right ones ? Because they are words forged for the pur­
pose of communicating thoughts and synchronizing activities in our
waking and working hours and inapt (as I found them) to com­
municate the experiences of a dream or the myth of our race pre­
sented as a dream.
This brings us very near to the question of comprehensibility,
which has quite a number of angles. Some writers are obscure
because their thought is too deep or too high or too tenuous, others
because they write of things in themselves comprehensible but which
we know nothing about, as, for example, in my own case, golf,
bridge, music, or quantum theory, and still others because they have
a religious experience peculiar to themselves which they may express
but can never communicate. One writer may be too universal,
another too local, and very few writers who are any good at all are
wholly clear to all of us-or wholly incomprehensible, provided we
consider the effort necessary to understand their material worth
while. It is not the fundamental idea of Finnegans Wake that makes
it difficult to understand and not the nature of the persons repre-
 G O I N G F O RTH B Y D AY
sented, for the idea of resurrection and recurrence is a popular idea
and the figures of myth are popular figures. It is not even the verbal
devices employed, which are, in the main, popular inventions. The
material is difficult because of the breadth ofJoyce's erudition and
the narrowness of his locality. He puns in half a dozen languages,
and all his local allusions are to the highways, byways, waterways,
back streets, and backchat of Dublin. I am quite sure that Finnegans
Wake is no stylistic experiment for its own sake. The innovations in
form and material grew out of the matter and are a natural organic
part of it. Where there is no snobbery of originality philistine resent­
ment should be disarmed in advance. In connection with the verbal
material of Finnegans Wake only one question seems to be worth con­
sidering : is that third element of the beautiful in Joyce's aesthetic
doctrine, that claritas, which Stephen Dedalus translates as 'radiance'
or 'whatness', and which a painter might, perhaps, call 'the essential
character' of his subject apprehended in life and embodied in his
material ? The best available way of answering this question is to
quote a couple of passages from the book and let the reader try to
substitute Oxford Dictionary words for those used by Joyce without
loss of essential character.
The first passage describes the ghostly unsubstantial meal at
Finnegan's Wake : 'Whase on the joint of a desh ? Finfoefum the
Fush. Whase be his baken head ? A loaf of Singpantry's Kennedy
bread. And whase hitched to the hop in his tayle? A glass of Danu
O'Dunnell's foamous olde Dobbelin ayle. But, lo, as you would
quaffoff his fraudstuff and sink teeth through that pyth of a flower­
white bodey behold of him as behemoth for he is noewhemoe.
Finiche ! Only a fadograph of a yestern scene.'
And here the wish of her womanhood observed passing through
the soul of a sleeping girl : 'Add lightest knot unto tiptition. 0
Charis ! 0 Charissima ! A more intriguant bambolina could one not
colour up out ofBoccuccia's Enameron. Would one but to do apart a
lilybit her virginelles and, so, to breath, so, therebetween, behold,
she had instantt with her handmade as to graps the myth inmid the
air. Mother of moth ! I will to show herword in flesh. Approach
not for ghost sake ! It is dormition !'
However, let the reader grapple with Joyce's dream time and
dream words as best he may, always remembering that, although it
33 0 JAMES J OYCE

may be a good principle to act so that our conduct may serve as a

rule of life to others, a writer need not write with the same circum­
spection-the reason being, no doubt, that English literature is a
much tougher plant than social behaviour. And let us be thankful
that there is no puzzle at all about the dream place. It is the valley
of the Liffey from Lucan to the sea and beyond to Howth Head,
but the centre of it, the focus of the picture, is the little village of
Chapelizod which lies athwart the river on the southwest corner of
Phoenix Park. More particularly the place is a little inn facing the
bridge where the publican, his family, and servants lie asleep.
As the name implies-Chapelle d' Iseult-it is the place to which
Tristan came to fetch his master's bride. Alfred Harmsworth was
born there; Arthur Guinness built his house on a neighbouring hill.
In another direction an imposing monument in stone perpetuates
the memory of Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington. Phoenix
Park, at once the scene and the symbol of Finn's constant resurrec­
tion, links Chapelizod with Dublin, 'a phantom city phaked of
philim pholk', and the giant himself lies partly in Phoenix Park,
where his feet are buried under the Magazine Mound, though his
head is as far away as Howth. Here he 'calmly extensolies' while the
'shortlegged bergins . . . are all there scraping along to sneeze out a
likelihood that will solve and salve life's robulous rebus, hopping
round his middle like kippers on a griddle, 0, as he lays dormont
from the macroborg of Holdhard to the microbirg of Pied de
Poudre.' Chapelizod is the scene of Sheridan Lefanu's delightful
novel, The House by the Churchyard. His Dangerfield, Devereux, Lilian,
Sturk, and Ezekiel Irons flit like shades across the pages of Joyce's
book. Joyce's father worked in the massive distillery, now redund­
ant, derelict, and to let, formerly the barracks of Lefanu's loyal
artillerymen. Commenting on a precis of Lefanu's book I made for
him in 1937 , Joyce wrote, referring to that spot in Phoenix Park
where the fierce Dangerfield struck down Sturk : 'The encounter
between my father and a tramp (the basis of my book) actually took
place at that part of the park.' And Lefanu's elm, 'the loftleaved
elm Lefanunian', together with a mossy stone, tell the story of
Anna Livia.
Ulysses is almost barren of descriptive passages. The Dublin of
Bloomsday has to be constructed out of the words of Bloom and his
 G O I N G F O RT H B Y D AY 33 1
fellow-wanderers. But in Finnegans Wake are many memorable pas­
sages of landscape evocation. And that is an understatement, for it
seems to me that the evening and night landscape in English litera­
ture has never been more magically realized than in Finnegans Wake.
The potency of this realization is due largely, I think, to the fact that
Joyce builds up his scene out of the memory of all senses, even that of
touch. The passage at the end of the old wives' gossip about the life
of Anna Livia Plurabelle is too well known to quote, but here is a
fragment of one of equal beauty from the chapter called The Mime of
Mick Nick and the Maggies. It describes the coming on of night and
the animals in the Zoo going to rest :

The trail of Gill not yet is to be seen, rocksdrops, up benn, down

dell, a craggy road for rambling. Nor yet through starland that
silver sash. What era's o'ering ? Lang gong late. Say long, scielo !
Sillume, see lo ! Selene, sail O ! Amune ! Ark ! ? Noh ? ! Nought
stirs in spinney. The swayful pathways of the dragonfly spider
stay still in reedery. Quiet takes back her folded fields. Tran­
quille thanks. Adew. In deerhaven, imbraced, alleged, injoynted
and unlatched, the birds, tommelise too, quail silent. . . . Was avond
ere a while. Now conticinium. As Lord the Laohun is sheut­
seuyes. The time of lying together will come and the wildering of
the nicht till cockeedoodle aubens Aurore. Panther monster.
Send leabarrow loads amorrow. While loevdom shleeps. Elen­
fant has siang his triump, Great is Eliphas Magistrodontos and after
kneeprayer pious for behemuth and mahamoth will rest him from
tusker toils. Salamsalaim ! Rhino horn isnoutso pigfellow but him
ist gonz wurst. Kikikuki. Hopopodorme. Sobeast ! No chare of
beagles, frantling of peacocks, no muzzing of the camel, smuttering
of apes. Lights, pageboy, lights ! Brights we'll be brights. With
help of Hanoukan's lamp. When otter leaps in outer parts then
Yul remembers Mei. Her hung maid mohns are bluming, look,
to greet those loes on coast of amethyst ; arcglow's seafire siemens
lure and wextward warnerforth's hookercrookers.

And apart from the extended passages such as these there are on
every page evocative words that call up an instant vision ofa hillside
bestrewn with boulders, a tree at a riverside, a white column, red
earth, a rippling brown river.
But the landscape is not only background and ambient for the
persons. It is the persons. Finn is Howth, and he is the landlord of
an inn on the road to Mullingar. Shem and Shaun are the rive
332 JAMES JOYCE

gauche and the rive dro ite of mother Liffey, and they are the rival
brothers whose struggles are the history of the family and city of
Finn. And so on. And here, perhaps, it may be said that Joyce
looked upon Dublin, which, with its environs, formed the ancient
kingdom of Dyffinarsky, as predominantly a Scandinavian city.
Objective historical grounds apart, he was no doubt the more con­
firmed in this viewpoint through his hostility to that petit-bourgeois
parochialism of I rish nationalism which loves to cloak itself in
Celtic myth. The Nordic element in Ireland in any case is a bridge
to Europe, and Joyce was a European as well as a Dubliner.
The population of Finnegans Wake is small compared with that of
Ulysses. There are seven persons in it-one family including servants
and to these may be added three group personalities. The city is
built out of these essences as the multitudinous shapes and sub­
stances of the world are built out of a small number of atoms.
First comes Finn himself, who died of a fall and was reborn at his
wake. In remote totem shape he is the swift salmon of the river, the
tough goat of the hill. His human origins are numerous. As Ur­
father Adam he 'lived in the broadest way immarginable . . . before
joshuan judges had given us numbers or Helveticus committed
deuteronomy.' And there is a hint of a later oriental origin when he
comes sailing 'in the boat of life . . . the gran Phenician rover', but
the two main sources that give him his local shape and character are
Scandinavian and Celtic, the two branches of the family of fair
strangers. As Scandinavian he is Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker;
as Celt he is Persse O'Reilly; and O'Reilly and Earwicker become
one when Persse O'Reilly becomes Pierce Oreille. This hero of
many origins is called for short H.C.E., his own initials or those of
Here Comes Everybody, a nickname applied to a more than usually
pompous member of one of the Victorian administrations, Harold
Childers Erskine. The unity of personality in Joyce's Adamite­
Nordic-Celtic hero is not less complete because of a chronic and
incurable dualism which manifests itself in a stammer of 'HeCit­
Ency'-his 'tribalbalbutience'. Earwicker wants Sunday closing
and Sunday clothing, but the O'Reilly wants seven days' license and
shirtsleeves all the week. He built a beautiful city and let it decay
into a slum. He is a 'big cleanliving giant', happily married and
enjoying the highest social position, but he was caught in a most
 GOI N G FOR T H BY DAY 333
compromising situation with a couple of nursemaids in the park.
He supports religious reform and family sanctity but sells contra­
ceptives to the populace. And so the duality of his mixed origin
keeps him precariously balanced throughout the whole of a master­
builder's, Lord Mayor's, and publican's existence.
The invention of names for his characters is one ofJoyce's favour­
ite methods of delineation. I haven't counted the names given to
Earwicker but should not be surprised if they ran into hundreds.
This character-defining by the giving of names is a device often used
in 'eddas and oddes bokes of tomb'.
This crookbacked hill, silvery fish, many-named human patriarch,
burly publican is never dressed twice alike. As gardener Adam he
hastens to meet his overlord dressed in 'topee, surcingle, solascarf
and plaid, plus fours, puttees and bulldog boots ruddled cinnabar
with flagrant marl', while as Kersse (Persse is as often spelt Kersse
on account of the Irish tendency to supplant the sound P with the
sound K) he sails into Dublin Bay 'umwalloped in an unusuable
suite of clouds'. Nevertheless, he is always 'as modern as tomorrow
afternoon and in appearance up to the minute'.
It is as Kersse that he woos, wins, and weds Anna Livia. And she ?
Was she a dewdrop in a Wicklow vale ? And did he find her while
he was looking for wild flowers ? Was she the tailor's daughter ? and
did he first see her lurking about her father's shop when he came in
asking 'in his translatentic norjankeltian : Hwere can a ketch or hook
alive a soot and sowterkins ?' This is not so clear and so it is probably
both. Her smallness at all ages is always insisted on. 'She was just
a young thin pale soft shy slim slip of a thing then, sauntering, by
silvamoonlake and he was a heavy trudging lurching lieabroad of a
Curraghman. . . .' As tailor's daughter she was so small that, when
he rang up about his suit, she had to stand on a pile of samples to
answer the phone, and Kersse-Humphrey, anxious about her lack of
bulk, followed her around the dinner table trying to persuade her to
eat a forkful of fat.
As an immortal river she is the daughter of Father Ocean and
Mother Sky, and she was born at some mysterious spot in the Wick­
low hills. Her partner, the male principle, came from a far place,
but she was always there. He has no youth and no age except the
age of the father and the hero, and no death, but inasmuch as Anna
334 JAMES JOYCE
Livia represents the life of the body she shares the fate and goes the
way of flesh. Three children-twin boys and one girl-are not a big
family. However, in a wider sense she is mother of all Dublin.
From three to a third of a million is simple if unusual arithmetic.
She writes the number of her children down one, one, one, as she
might write the customers' credit drinks on the bar slate, and that
makes a hundred and eleven. She ll.dds them together and puts the
three in place of the third one. Then she adds H. C.E. and herself to
make the constantly recurring I I 32 . . So is the city made.
All the houses and public monuments of Dublin, all its civic
glories, its laws, its liberties, learning, and amenities are the work of
Bygmester Finn. He himself declares it in a broadcast he is called
upon to give by the four masters. He grandly proclaims all the
civilizing work he has done for the city of the Ford of Hurdles until
his frustrating other self, in what appears to be a charity organization
broadcast, steals his air and describes in detail the rotting misery of
Poolblack's highly respectable slums. There are few correspond­
ences between Finnegans Wake and Ulysses, but we seem to hear in
the brave stammer of Finn more than a hint of the indomitable
Simon Dedalus. Anna Livia has no parallel in Ulysses. She repre­
sents, as does the woman always in Joyce's work, the mortal body of
the race, but there is none of the heavy fleshiness of Molly Bloom in
her make-up. She is the active, cheerful, never-done-working wife
and mother, bearing children, running the home, scrubbing the
twins after their constant combats, comforting them when they
wake squalling in the night, giving gifts to all her 'daughtersons',
spreading the gossip, gratefully drinking the black ale brewed for
her by Finn, sitting on Sunday in the church he built for her, but
worshipping mainly at home, for 'washup' is one of her forms of
worship.
The twins, Shem and Shaun, are opposites, poles asunder and
inseparable, hostile and complementary, held together and apart by
the river of life that bore them. The inevitable self-portrait is Shem
the Penman, called also Glugg and Jerry, the Gripes and the Grace­
hoper, while his brother, Shaun the Post, called also Chuff and
Kevin, the Mookse and the Ondt, is all or any ofJoyce's contempor­
aries. Shaun has to deliver a letter written by Shem, but the letter is
never written and therefore never delivered (just as 'that royal one
 G O I N G F O RT H B Y D AY 335
has not yet drunk a gouttelette from his consummation . . . and all
that has been done has yet to be done and done again . . . .') . With
his twin rivals Joyce is giving poetic form to the constant human
experience that the world maintains its balance through a conflict of
opposites. Families are founded on it, societies grow out of it, par­
liaments flourish on it, and the human individual finds his refreshing
opposite and complement in club and pub. If no sinner or saint or
rebel or tyrant faced us we should have to split ourselves to find one.
Finnegans Wake provides for this lonely contingency with the con­
stantly recurring dual personality Browne and Nolan, at once the
well-known firm of Dublin booksellers and Giordano Bruno of Nola,
whose dualistic philosophy turns the bookselling unity, Browne and
Nolan, into the hostile duality, Browne versus Nolan. Michael and
Lucifer were the original heavenly pattern for this brotherly strife,
and Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, Willingdone and Boomapart,
and millions of other pairs have given and will forever give the
earthly repetition.
Joyce's self-caricature as Shem is a tour de force in the comic
grotesque, a genre in which Joyce excels. The likeness is unmistak­
able for all the posturing and grimacing in the distorting mirror.
Joyce was no satirist, but he was a master of mimicry and caricature.
He was rather a Rowlandson than-a Daumier. He loved the spec­
tacle of life too well to condemn any part of it. The comment
implicit in caricature was enough. A step further might involve him
in moral judgements forbidden by his individualistic rule of life and
by his aesthetic creed.
Shem is a sham, and a low sham. He lives on tinned food and likes
it, and instead of getting drunk on good honest booze he 'sobbed
himself wheywhingingly sick of life on some sort of a rhubarbarous
maundarin yellagreen funkleblue windigut diodying applejack
squeezed from sour grapefruice.' He believes in nothing and agrees
with everybody, boasts about his people and their social position,
stinks the place out, 'lives on loans and is furtivefree yours of age'.
As a patriot he is a washout, for he 'became a farsoonerite, saying he
would far sooner muddle through the hash of lentils in Europe than
meddle with Irrland's split little pea', and as a writer he bores every­
body stiff with talking about his 'usylessly unreadable Blue Book of
Eccles'. He ducks all duties and dodges all obligations, and while all
 JAMES JOYCE
the world was at war for great causes he 'kuskykorked himself up tight
in his inkbattle house, badly the worse for boosegas, there to stay in afar
for the life. . . .' Browne in the person ofJustius rises up against this
Nayman of Noland, and there is little left of him after his dressing
down till he is saved and restored by remembering his mother river
and the contemplation of her inexhaustible treasure of life flowing
past.
There is no trace of father and son conflict in Finnegans Wake, and
therefore no reconciliation. The big man is master of his house and
city. By way of rebirth he manifests himself through all the genera­
tions of his sons when they become of man's estate. All strife is of
brother with brother, but even these fraternal wars are bloodless
combats: Their hostility is a static hostility, for they are living on
the plain ofShinar in that tower built into the sky in a unity that will
last till day overcomes and scatters them. Joyce accepted the tower
of Babel a.s a symbol of sleep. 'Behold the people is one, and they
have all one language.' And he thought it strange that he should
have been working several years on his book before the correspond­
ence occurred to him.
Shem and Shaun never appear except in opposition, but whereas
Shem is a clear-cut personality-an unmistakable caricature­
portrait <:>f the author-Shaun is by comparison a shadowy figure.
The reason for this, perhaps, is that many models sat for Shaun, and
only one for Shem. Most painters will agree that the use of many
models for one figure is apt to lead to the abstract and away from the
organic. One feels that a type or a race is being examined by the
four masters rather than an individual person. What is clear about
the shadowy Shaun is that he is a true believer, a gourmand, a
sensualist, a persuasive talker (as witness his sermon to the twenty­
nine daughters of February) , an arriviste with his face turned to­
wards the west where the money is, a favoured of the gods, and a
great success with the girls.
There are twenty-nine girls representing each a day of February
fill-dyke, but only the twenty-ninth is the twins' sister and one of
Anna Livia's hundred and eleven. Who begat and who bore the
other twenty-eight need not concern us in this 'semitary of Somni­
onia'. Iseult's birthday comes once in four years so that she will be
still a desirable beauty of twenty-five when her sisters are scored with
 GOI N G FOR T H BY D AY 337
a century of crowsfeet. She is the colourful cloud overhanging
mother river, overhearing brother rivals mudslinging wordily about
words and things, such as space and time. She reminds them that,
for her, space is contracting and time flying, and she uses all the arts
allowed a leap-year daughter to win them from their useless conflict
for her useful purpose, but when she falls it is for mountain father
Finn, whose eyes are ever fixed on his river's fresh youth in which he
is overseen. 'Yes, you're changing, sonhusband, and you're turning,
I can feel you, for a daughterwife from the hills again.'
All members of the Finn family have a side on which they merge
with their opposite, as Earwicker takes on the character of a river
and Anna Livia (A.L.P.) reflects the image of a mountain, Shem
becomes Shaunesque and Shaun Shemesque, and daughter-mother
Iseult hovers between sky and riverend. Even potman Joe borrows
some of Earwicker's publican authority, and maidservant Kate
rivalizes with her mistress while ironing the guvnor's lumbago on the
kitchen table. She reminds him of the days when she was principal
boy in the pantomime, and for his benefit (as he can't move) she
repeats the performance : ' . . . when I started so hobmop ladlelike,
highty tighty, to kick the time off the cluckclock lucklock quam­
quam camcam potapot panapan kickakickkack. Hairhorehounds,
shake up pfortner. Fuddling fun for Fullacan's sake.'
Because of their ancient earthiness I associate this pair with the
gossiping elm and stone washerwomen who tell the story of Anna
Livia, with the Mutt andJute stick and stone on the field of Clontarf
who discuss that 'law of isthmon' by which cities arise and are
doomed to their 'Finishthere Punct', and who, as Muta and Juva,
observe the dawn lighting up the stained-glass windows of the village
church and talk of the Eurasian outsider come to convert the high
king of all Ireland to the true faith.
A group personality of twelve functions as customers at the big
man' s bar, as a j ury charged with the examination of Earwicker's
conduct, as loungers staring at a river, and their right-minded
comment is delivered always with long words ending in ' -ation' . But
more difficult to understand and more important in their relation to
the principal persons in the book are the four masters, analists,
waves, winds, provinces, evangelists, or institutions and their
accompanying grey ass. They are the guardians of tradition,
 JAMES JOYCE
keepers of records, male sibyls, seekers after higher truths, lecherous
admirers of male and female flesh. Their records, however, are lost,
their memories confused, and their virility diluted to neutrality with
femininity, yet they achieve an immortality of decrepitude as if the
life in them were constantly renewed with injections of some secret
all-glandular preparation. A Doctor Walker and a pretty nurse
attend to their infirmities. They flounder blindly and deafly around
in the dream space of the inn, 'in all fathom of space' mumbling
of the good old 'days not worth remembering', sucking at bottles
and urging each other to 'pass the kish for crawsake', with senile
amorousness fondling the hands of their nurse, trying to count up the
mother-of-pearl buttons on her glove. It appears that nobody wants
them in the house, but their power of infiltration is equal to that of
dryrot, draughts, smells, dust, or circulars. Boneless, bloodless,
toothless, covered with bedsores, dolled up in their blankets, they
manage somehow to be present at all family celebrations, even peep­
ing through the salt-encrusted portholes at Tristan and Iseult on
their honeymoon in one of the steamadories 'made by Fumadory'.
They are most in evidence when night is darkest and sleep deepest,
and therefore they may be taken to represent the point of identity of
the contraries, corruption and birth, but whatever its philosophic
significance this fearsome foursome of disintegration is certainly one
of the most astonishing of all Joyce's grotesque inventions.
I have never been able to see much racial difference between the
Irish and the rest of us. If the bottle is well shaken it looks like the
mixture as before. But there is a difference between the Irish and
English imagination. The Irish imagination is continuous and
expresses itself in a constant play of wit and fancy on the immediate
material of life. It embroiders on the facts until the original fabric is
hardly visible. In its popular aspect it is a thing of exaggerations,
legpulls, backbites, sly digs, winks, thumb j erks, and talking through
a lattice of fingers, all enjoyed by a lot of cheerful people in their
shirtsleeves sitting in a draughty kitchen. All Persse O'Reilly, in
fact, and at its creative best a Book of Kells or a Tristram Shandy.
It functions only on high days, holy days, and Sundays, and because
it is something apart it occasionally looks like a suburban parlour
with a harmonium in it, but when it has functioned creatively it has
imposed its offspring and its order on whole provinces of the mind.
 GOI N G FOR T H BY DAY 339
It is, in fact, all Earwicker. Finnegans Wake, like its hero, is a product
of both. It is a fusion of Earwicker imagination and O'Reilly fancy,
of plastic vision and graphic wit. The figures are of mythical pro­
portions, but they are built up out of the commonest material, out of
puns and slang, hurdy-gurdy tunes and music-hall catchwords, and
all the instruments of popular humour.
Joyce worked with the material of the marketplace, and if he is
not understood there, it is certainly not on account of any preciosity
in himself. His figures, for their forthrightness, belong there like
Rodin's burgesses, for Joyce wrote out of the centre of his conscious­
ness where his own experience was at one with that of his fellow-men.
All the more strange that he should be sometimes regarded as a
dweller in an ivory tower. Ivory tower ! You don't get an Ear­
wicker, sailor, publican, city builder, and city father ; an Anna Livia,
lover, mother, and house drudge ; or a Bloom, with his associated
Dubliners, to say nothing of Molly Bloom, out of any ivory tower.
And as this borders on politics I must confess that I was once
guilty of helping to create the impression that Joyce was nonpolitical.
He was certainly non-party, but no man can be nonpolitical who
spends the greater part of his life in celebrating his native city. His
first book was a series of studies showing the virtues and vices of his
fellow-Dubliners. He went on to paint a portrait of himself against
the moral and physical background of Dublin. He recorded a
lengthy day in the life of his mother city as seen and felt for the
greater part by a stranger within her gates. His last work glorifies
the spirit that founded and maintained the city of the Ford of
Hurdles and affirms his belief in the persistence of that spirit through
all changing circumstances. Joyce was certainly sceptical of all
political parties and all political creeds, but he believed in the city
and rejoiced in its life. He refused only to take part in the struggle
as to who should govern it. The political novelist of the notebook or
classbook order may at any moment descend on us (we are a
beleaguered city, and the danger is very real) , and when he does we
shall know how to appreciate the artist who saw and felt and gave
shape to that which is durable in life.
Many philosophies flit mothlike with characteristic words across
the pages ofFinnegans Wake, and ancient ritual books and compila­
tions, particularly the Norse Edda and the Egyptian Book of the Dead,
34° JAME S JOY CE

are more constantly recurring themes, but the two Italians, Vico and
Bruno, provide Joyce with the philosophic motive and to some
extent with the pattern of his book. Vico's theory of cyclic evolution,
which allows for identity of personality in change and for recurrence
in progression, might well appeal to the poet who dressed up the
archer king of Ithaca in a black suit and bowler hat and sent him
out on a quest for advertisements, or whose H.C.E. rules the city
whatever party is in power. And Bruno's theory of duality and
identity of contraries must have needed little demonstration to the
individualist who refused to serve and became his own taskmaster,
to the exile who took his city into exile with him.
There is a passage in Part IV ofFinnegans Wake (in the language of
somebody rolling over for the last doze before waking up) which
seems to me to be a statement of the philosophy of the book :

The untireties of livesliving being the one substrance of a

streamsbecoming. Totalled in toldteld and teldtold in tittletell
tattle. Why ? Because, graced be Gad and all giddy gadgets, in
whose words were the beginnings, there are two signs to turn to,
the yest and the ist, the wright side and the wronged side, feeling
aslip and wauking up, so an, so farth. Why ? On the sourdsite we
have the Moskiosk Djinpalast with its twin adjacencies, the bat­
house and the bazaar, allahallahallah, and on the sponthesite it is
the alcovan and the rosegarden, boony noughty, all puraputhry.
Why ? One's apurr apuss a story about brid and breakfedes and
parricombating and coushcouch but others is of tholes and oub­
worn buyings, dolings and chafferings in heat, contest and enmity.
Why ? Every talk has his stay, vidnis Shavarsanjivana, and all-a­
dreams perhapsing under lucksloop at last are through. Why ?
It is a sot of a swigswag, systomy dystomy, which everabody you
ever anywhere at all doze. Why ? Such me.

Thus if you say that life is being you are right ; equally right if you
say that life is becoming ; doubly right if you say that life is both
being and becoming. If you say that life is a two-sided affair of per­
petual conflict you affirm what is evident to every true body; if you
declare that life is one and indivisible you echo that which the mind
in its salmon leap of inspiration has been able to perceive. And
characteristically the dreamer's final answer to the insistent 'Why ?'
is the personal 'Such me', which I take to mean, 'You can search me,
but that is how I feel about it.'
 G O I N G FORT H B Y D AY 34 1
Many a man is the ha ttleground of his virtues, as Nietzsche said,
and it seems to me to follow that many an artist may be the battle­
ground of his talents. Joyce, I believe, kept peace within himself by
choosing a motif upon which all his many selves might co-operate.
Hence the rich and varied freights of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.
But did he manage to stow all the precious cargo in one hold ? Was
nothing left on the quayside for a later voyage ? What became of the
master of the short story, and of the severe yet pitiful regard for the
stunted souls and thwarted destinies of weak human beings in
Dubliners ? Are there any other short stories in English that are
neither de Maupassant curtains nor Chekhov fade-outs ?
I have heard Joyce express disdain for 'telling a story' and years
later (on rereading Flaubert's Contes) say that that was just the thing
he would most love to do. It is possible, however, to have done with
a technical medium and to put it away altogether as a painter may
give up portrait painting and take to wall painting, and so it is likely
that, having found a way of making people and things speak for
themselves, Joyce would never have returned to speaking about
them. What is not possible is that an artist shall suppress any part of
his humanity. The key of Ulysses is too bright, its movement too
rapid, for that pity and reconciliation which provide the magical
end of the story, 'The Dead', to have any part in it; but that same
human element expressed with yet greater artistry does return in the
last pages of Finnegans Wake, when Anna Livia goes forth by day, as
a woman (wife and mother, representative of all flesh) to join the
countless generations of the dead, as a river to become one with the
god, her father Ocean. She tells her human agony with the voice
and gesture of the river. A leaf is floating with her, a prize from the
woods of Lucan, and the city is asleep, but the sun is rising in her
mother's house. She is full of memories, and she lisps them to the
mind, her mate, whom she sees over the bay in his mountain form,
whose gulls wheel over her. There is no answer from Finn. Her
words are softly spoken, sometimes half articulate, so that we feel we
have to bend to hear them as we bend to hear precious words on the
lips of the dying. Memories fail her. Dreams of past grandeur fade.
Her children she thought so fine disgust her. Her human fear of loss
of personality overcomes her as her sweet waters are fouled by the
brackish water of the estuary which is like a foretaste of death. She
342 JAMES JOYCE
tides herself over her fears with illusions of grandeurs to come, how
she will be received by her mighty sisters, wild Amazia and haughty
Niluna. With a last thought of Finn and a wish to live again, as if a
wish had in itself a force of fulfilment, she passes over the bar into her
father's home.
Carry me along, taddy, like you done through the toy fair. If I
seen him bearing down on me now under whitespread wings like
he'd come from Arkangels, I sink I'd die down over his feet,
humbly dumbly, only to washup. Yes, tid. There's where. First.
We pass through grass behush the bush to. Whish ! A gull. Gulls.
Far calls. Coming, far ! End here. Us then. Finn, again ! Take.
Bussoftlhee, mememormee ! Till thousandsthee. Lps. The keys
to. Given ! A way a lone a last a loved a long the . . .
The last work of Joyce ends, as did his first, in the contemplation
of the mystery of death. In both cases the rebellious pity of the
human heart finds in the beauty of a constant element of nature-in
the one falling snow, in the other smooth-gliding water-the symbol
and the instrument of reconciliation with human destiny. We had
hoped for further years and other labours. We cannot imagine a
fitter swan song.
 JAMES JOYCE

And so James Joyce has been laid to rest in Zurich. Of the many
habitations of the self-exiled Dubliner none is better fitted to receive
his mortal remains. He passed through Zurich as a young man on his
way to Trieste. He returned there in the early days of the Great
( 19 14-18) War. It was there that the greater part of Ulysses took
shape-there, too, that the seeds were sown which grew into
Finnegans Wake. I met Joyce for the first time in a cafe garden on the
slopes of the Zurichberg. He was then composing the Lestrygo nians,
the seventh episode of Ulysses. I saw him for the last time in the
spring of 1939 at his flat in Passy. A copy of Finnegans Wake, hot
from the press, lay on the table. The third of his lifetime lay between.
I read the news of his death as I was about to go on duty for the
night. As usual, the threat of death was in the air, but I felt sad for
the loss of a friend.
When I met him in Zurich he was, but for his eyes, a healthy
though not a robust man, thin and tallish like a boy who has shot up
too quickly. His face was a bricky red, his hair near black, his beard
orange brown, his eyes clear blue, his lips thin and set in a straight
line, his forehead high and domed but full of crisp, clean shape. He
gave a limp hand and spoke with care, but he unbent as the evening
wore on. He explained his defensive attitude to me later. He was at
loggerheads with the British Consulate, and he had heard that I was
a consulate employee, so, putting two and two together, he thought
I might be told off to spy upon his views and movements. What
reassured him, it appears, was that I looked like Arthur Shrewsbury,
the Notts and England cricketer, a good bat in his day.
We ought to know a lot about Joyce, seeing that he was at great
pains to tell us all he could. He put himself in all his books. He is
the unnamed boy in Dubliners, Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, Richard in Exiles, and Shem the
Penman inFinnegans Wake, and, if Joyce painted them himself, who
344 JAMES JOYC E
shall say that any of them is a bad likeness ? However, when the
sitter has left his chair and the artist has packed up his colour box, the
friends and relations may give their opinion. Mine is that the best
likenesses are the sensitive watchful boy in Dubliners and the over­
life-size caricature of Shem the Penman in Finnegans Wake. Stephen
persisted in the shape of attitudes, mannerisms, learned in a Jesuit
school, used for defensive purposes, and by usage become habit.
Behind this defensive barrier there was a shrewd counselor, a con­
sistent and helpful friend, a good companion-talker and listener­
and (what never appears in any of the self-portraits) a self-forgetting,
impish humour expressed in fantastic antics and drolleries, songs,
and dances.
Joyce was a self-centred man. How can an artist take his cargo to
port without concentrating on the sailing of his ship ? But he was a
man with a need for friends and a capacity for friendship with its
egalitarian laws and constitution. After an estrangement of a couple
of years Joyce, hearing I was in Paris, asked me to call, which I did.
When he saw me to the door he said : 'I hope you'll always believe
that I'm a good friend, Budgen.' There is nothing Stephenesque in
that except the use of the surname. Joyce was afraid of Christian
names, and the Po rtrait of the Artist gives the clue. He always
addressed his letters to me as Francis Budgen, Esq. I told him I was
christened Frank, but it made no difference. He just couldn't bring
himself to write the more intimate-sounding monosyllable, even
prefaced with Mr. or adorned with Esq. It is worth noting that in
all Joyce's work the relations between man and woman are of a
monumental simplicity, and that complications and the subtler
shades arise only in the relations between man and man.
He preferred the more formal manners of most continental coun­
tries. English formlessness-such, for example, as a publisher's
addressing him as plain Joyce while sitting on a table and dangling
his legs-,-gave him a shock. But he liked the English. I once praised
French manners and advanced the theory that the people had taken
them from the nobles at the same time that they took their lands.
Joyce stopped for a moment in the street as a peasant comes to a
standstill when he wants to say something important. 'Yes,' he said,
'the French are polite, but if you want civility you must go to Eng­
land. The English have more civic sense than any people I know.'
 JAMES JOYCE 345
He thought French women the cleverest in the world and the most
womanly. He liked Italy and the Italians, but he could never forgive
the Italian university (it was Padua, I think) that failed him in an
examination in English. The examining professor was an old
woman looking like Sairey Gamp, black bag and all complete, and
no knowledge of English at all.
Joyce was afraid of thunder and all explosive noises, of dogs, nuns,
and many other things, but he was less afraid of pain and sickness
than most men. He bore the affliction of his eyes and his series
of eye operations with remarkable fortitude. He was not afraid of
human beings of whatever degree. And least of all was he afraid of
failure. His confidence in himself was as unbounded as it appeared
to be. Now we know that Ulysses was a best-seller; but all the years
of its composition Joyce laboured on it, reckless of time, not knowing
how or by whom it would be published, aware that he was writing a
masterpiece, and just as aware that masterpieces may be the death
of their creators.
Joyce took no part in politics and but rarely, and unwillingly, in
political discussion. He was quite likely to yawn through a discussion
on, say, Karl Marx's theories and only prick up his ears if Marx's
birthday was mentioned, the reason being that his mythology had
room for birthdays and no room for theories. As I wrote in James
Joyce and the Making of' Ulysses':
An occasional vague reference to the pacific American anarch­
ist, Tucker, was the only indication I ever heard of a political
outlook. His view seemed to be that government is work for the
specialist; and the artist, another specialist, had better leave it
alone. And then government is in the last resort the use of force,
whereas the artist's method is persuasion. True, the artist, like the
rest of the world, is also a citizen, and laws are made for him to
obey and taxes are levied for him to pay. Actively or passively he
is a member of the social organization. 'Then let it be passively'
would express roughly Joyce's attitude.
However, being nonpolitical is easier said than done. The passive
attitude has its active implications, which may at times imperatively
demand expression. Given the choice, most poets would prefer to
make the ballads and let others make the laws, but what if those who
make the laws decide to dictate what ballads shall be made ? In the
present conflict there is no doubt whereJoyce's sympathies would lie.
 JA MES JO Y CE
He did his best during the 1914-18 war to further the Allied cause by
cultural propaganda in the shape of his work for the English Players.
In my opinion, he would have been still more hostile to the Ger­
many of today, with its threat of disaster to his artist's freedom.
Religion and politics are nets by which the free soul can fly only if
there is no Inquisition in the one and no Gestapo in the other. But
one thing is certain: Not all the dictators and Gauleiters of Europe
would ever have made him write a line of which his conscience as
man or artist disapproved. Writing was to him a religion, and the
word a sacred material.
Like most of his countrymen he was a born debrouillard and humor­
ously proud of it. I well remember his triumph when, on one occa­
sion in Zurich, we started level in an effort to raise the wind, and he
passed the post ahead of me with lengths to spare. He willed the end
and was not afraid of the means. Whatever arts of seamanship were
necessary to bring his precious cargo safely to port he would and did
master.
Joyce flew by the nets of religion and Irish oppressed nation
politics, and parties and classes meant nothing to him, but there was
one social institution that for him was quasi-sacred: the family.
Jews irritated him at times and at others bored him, but he admired
the Jew as a family man. 'I sometimes think', he said to me once in
Paris, 'that it was a heroic sacrifice on their part when they refused
to accept the Christian revelation. Look at them. They are better
husbands than we are, better fathers, and better sons.' This was
further to his assertion that he had put the Jew on the map of Euro­
pean literature. What he thought of them as one oppressed and
chosen race against another is best seen in his confrontation of the
two-eyed reasonable Jew with the one-eyed Fenian gasbag in Barney
Kiernan's saloon. (The Cyclops episode in Ulysses.) The last time I
saw him in Paris he told me that he had already made it possible for
sixteen Jews to find asylum from Nazi persecution in Britain. It has
often occurred to me thatJoyce's nervous avoidance of all discussion
on the government of the city was due to his greater care for the
solidarity of the family. How many families have been scattered by
the explosive or dissolved by the acid of politics ! How much political
dispute is but a family quarrel writ large !
Sayings of Joyce that stick do so like sayings of Lincoln-for their
 JAMES JOYCE 347
horse sense. In my hearing he answered (perhaps for the hundredth
time) the question : 'Aren't there enough words for you in the five
hundred thousand of the English language ?' 'Yes, there are enough
of them, but they are not the right ones.' Rebutting the charge of
vulgarity against the use of the pun, he said : 'The Holy Roman
Catholic Apostolic Church was built on a pun. It ought to be good
enough for me.' And a studied ripost : 'Yes. Some of the means I
use are trivial-and some are quadrivia!.' August Suter, the Swiss
sculptor, met Joyce as he was beginning to write Finnegans Wake,
and Joyce' s description of his enterprise was : 'I am boring into a
mountain from two sides. The question is, how to meet in the
middle.' There spoke the 'great artificer'.
As a craftsman Joyce was exclusive and stuck to his last, but his
appreciations were wide. He had his own contacts with all the arts
and a forthright, natural judgement of the products of them un­
influenced by the cant of any aesthetic doctrine. He told me in
Zurich that of all artists painters were the freest intelligences; and he
didn't say it because he was talking to a painter but because he found
it refreshing to talk to people whose job it is to look at things and not
through them. Music was the art that lay nearest his own-vocal
music in particular. All his friends will remember his Sullivan period.
Sullivan (a Parisian Irishman with the mas:.ive shoulders and lion
muzzle ofJim Larkin, the labour leader) was the greatest tenor since
Tamagno, and the world should know it and confess it. The
Academie Nationale de la Musique must have blessed Joyce, for
he bought tickets for Guillaume Tell and gave them to everybody he
knew. The least musical of his friends got one. The next day he
asked me what I thought of the voice. I told him it reminded me of
the Forth Bridge. He took a quick breath, leaned back, and dis­
appeared behind his glasses. (He could do this in moments of sudden
concentration.) He reappeared and said decisively : 'That's very
good, Budgen. But it isn't right. That is not the voice of iron. It is the
voice of stone. Stonehenge is the comparison-not the Forth Bridge.'
Guessing at the last months of Joyce's life begets melancholy
reflections. War in the Low Countries, the invasion of France, the
pitiful torrent of refugees ( also exiles) , the entry of the Germans into
the city he loved, the move southward, sickness, the hurried depar­
ture for Zurich. How we feared the worst when we read the word
 J A MES J O Y CE

'Urgent !' But I was thankful it was Zurich. I know how many
devoted friends were there to comfort and sustain Mrs. Joyce. No
wonder Joyce could so well dispense with contact with his native
land. Ireland herself was ever present at his side.
Soon the snow will be melting on the Zurich berg and Uetliberg
and falling from dark branches by drip, by drip. The Limmat will
quicken her pace to meet her sister Aar. The Fohn wind will blow
and the Glarus mountains light up. 'Sechseliiuten' is coming. They
will soon burn the winter 'Bogg' in the Beltane fire at the lakeside.
I shall go to Zurich, if I am alive when this war is over, and I shall
take the No. 5 tram up the Zuri'berg, and I shall stand before a
mound of earth, but I shall not look for Joyce there. I shall hail
him across the Bahnhofstrasse as jauntily, short-sightedly, he saunters
lakeward. I shall bump into him as with coat collar turned up and
coat belt tight he turns a windy corner in Niederdorf. I shall hail
him : ' Hullo, there,' as he comes into the Pfauen Cafe, spectacles
gaily glittering and a wisp of Ulysses sticking out of his breast pocket,
to take his place on the other side of a litre of Fendant.

We sat in Joyce's flat in Passy. Review strips of Finnegans Wake lay

ar�und. I said I thought we had had enough of the story of his rude­
ness to Yeats. ('You are too old for me to help you.') Joyce affirmed
that the story was untrue and went on to instance the many occa­
sions on which he had shown his respect and admiration for Ire­
land's greatest poet. In Dr. Gogarty's review of his book he thought
he could espy admiration for his great feat of endurance. 'Gogarty
is an athlete,' he said, 'a cyclist and a swimmer. He should know
what staying power is.'
We left the flat together and walked over the bridge to the Left
Bank. Joyce tapped the pavement repeatedly with his new snake­
wood stick, a prized acquisition. I told him the only stick I possessed
was an olive branch. A suitable companion, he thought. He sug­
gested that I should write an article onFinnegans Wake and entitle it
James Joyce's Bo o k of the Dead. We dawdled cityward. I had a
rendezvous at the Dome, and Joyce one with Paul Leon. All daw­
dling in Paris ends in taxis. Joyce set me down at the Dome and
waved out of the traffic jam, ' Lots of fun.' Newly initiated, I gave
the response, 'At Finnegans Wake' . 194 1
 FURTHER RECOLLECTIONS
O F JAM E S J O Y C E
Joyce was born on 2 February, Candlemas, of the year 1882 , and I
on I March, St. David's Day of the same year, so that he was my
senior by twenty-six days. My book, James Joyce and the Making of
' Ulysses', appeared in 1 934 when Joyce was still with us and, as some
may remember, that book contained, among other matters, some
personal recollections of the author of Ulysses designed to give the
reader an idea of the man as well as of his work. Here I set forth a
few more such recollections with the same end in view. They follow
no plan, unless there is a concealed plan in the seemingly haphazard
operations of memory. Should any of them appear trivial I entrench
myself in advance behind Joyce's own doctrine, which was that a
place where three or four roads meet is a good place to look and
listen for talk and happenings that signify much.
As I knew him Joyce liked to talk about his work when he could
find an understanding listener, and particularly he liked to talk
about that upon which he was actively engaged, and I surmise that
this talk served a dual purpose. It kept his mind fixed upon the
matter in hand, and it provoked responsive comment which might,
and often did, prove useful to him.
Understandably the talk in Zurich turned generally on Ulysses, and
I can remember few references in that period to his play, Exiles. But
later in Paris, in the autumn of 1 933 , he referred to Exiles in con­
nection with my book on Ulysses. The reference is important because
of the light it throws on theJoycean conception of sexual love (at any
rate on the male side) as an irreconcilable conflict between a passion
for absolute possession and a categorical imperative of absolute free­
dom. It occurred during a short stay I made in Paris on my way to
Switzerland. I had sent the proofs of my book on in advance, and
Joyce and Stuart Gilbert had begun to read them. For my short stay
I was the guest of the Joyces.
There is a passage in my book in which I try to explain the
3 50 JAMES JOYCE
motives for Bloom's conduct as, seemingly, a mari complaisant. Readers
of Ulysses all remember that in the Sirens episode Bloom watches
Blazes Boylan's exit from the Ormond Hotel, well knowing that the
organizer of Molly Bloom's concert tour is bound for 7 Eccles Street,
and that in all probability an act of adultery will there take place.
What was to be explained was Bloom's inactivity when, seeing that
the drift of events is towards his wife's infidelity and his own cuck­
oldry, he makes no effort to stem the drift. Rather he contemplates
in advance the fait acco mpli with a sort of cool, detached fatalism.
Joyce said: 'You see an undercurrent of homosexuality in Bloom
as well as his loneliness as a Jew who finds no warmth of fellowship
among either Jews or Gentiles, and no doubt you are right. But there
is another aspect of the matter you seem to have missed.'
'And that is ?'
'Have you ever read or seen Le Co cu magnifique ?'
I told him I hadn't and waited for the sequel.
'You ought to read it,' he said. 'Do you remember I wrote to you
soon after I came to Paris that Exiles was to be put on by Lugne Poe,
and that in the end nothing came of it ? You do ? Well, it was Le Co cu
magnifique that took the wind out of the sails of Exiles. The jealousy
motive is the same in kind in both cases. The only difference is that
in my play the people act with a certain reserve, whereas in Le Co cu
the hero, to mention only one, acts like a madman. Make all the
necessary allowances, and you'll see that Bloom is of the same
family.'
It was not difficult to see the family likeness in Leopold Bloom and
Richard Rowan as soon as it was pointed out. In due course a copy
of Le Co cu magnifique was forwarded to me in Switzerland, and sure
enough there was the same theme-only heavily scored for the brass.
Richard and Leopold provoke and let happen, whereas the magni­
ficent cuckold stands by with his shotgun and his 'Malheur a celui qui
ne vient pas.' Unfortunately it was then too late for me to make the
desirable addition to my own text.
Apropos the said galley proofs: as they were read aloud by Gilbert
or myself they were placed one after the other on Joyce's knees,
from which insecure position they slithered, as is their way, a few at
a time on to the floor. As soon as Joyce stooped to pick up the fallen
ones others slipped off to take their place. Joyce's comment was :
 FURTHER RECOLLECTIONS 35 1
'Galley proofs remind me of the persons of the Trinity. Get firm hold
of one of them and you lose grip on the others.'
This theological image occurs again in a letter to me dictated to
his daughter Lucia and sent to me shortly after I left Paris for
Switzerland. Joyce was very interested in my working something
about the Altkatholische Kirche into my record of life in Zilrich. He
felt that a picture of that noble city would' be incomplete without
such a reference. The relevant part of the letter reads:

The old catholics Augustiner Kirche are a good example of a

Mooks gone Gripes. They separated from Rome in 71 when the
infallibility of the Pope was proclaimed a Dogma but they have
since gone much more apart. They have abolished auricular
confession they have the eucarist under two species but the faithful
received the cup only at Whitsun. I see no prayers to the BVM
or the saints in their prayer book and no images of her or them
around the church. But most important of all they have abolished
the Filioque clause in the creed concerning which there has been
a schism between western and eastern christendom for over a
thousand years, Rome saying that the Holy Ghost proceeds from
the Father and the Son. Greece and Russia and the East Orthodox
churches that the procession is from the father alone, ex patre
without Filioque. Of course the dogmas subsequently proclaimed
by Rome after the split are not recognized by the east church,
such as the Immaculate conception. See the Mooks and the
Gripes [Note : This is of course in Finnegans Wake. F.B.] that is
West and east, paragraph beginning when that Mooksius and
ending Philioquus. All the grotesque words in this are in russian
or greek for the three principal dogmas which separate Shem from
Shaun. When he gets A and B on to his lap C slips off and when
he has C and A he looses hold of B. . . .

Joyce alluded to the split of 1871 in the course of a conversation

with me in Zilrich, but all that I can remember of it (perhaps the
question interested me little at the time) is his final word : 'What I
can't understand', he said, 'is, why do they boggle at the infallibility
of the Pope if they can swallow all the rest.' The Holy Roman
Catholic Apostolic Church in its Irish form was a net he had flown
by, but having won thef reedom he needed, he could admire the
Church as an institution going on its own way unperturbed in obedi­
ence to the law of its own being. 'Look, Budgen,' he said. 'In the
nineteenth century, in the full tide of rationalist positivism and equal
35 2 JAMES JOY CE
democratic rights for everybody, it proclaims the dogma of the
infallibility of the head of the Church and also that of the Immacu­
late Conception.'
Joyce's attitude toward the Christian religion was twofold. When
he remembered his own youthful conflict with it in its Irish-Roman
form he could be bitterly hostile, but in general, viewing it as a whole
as an objective reality and as epitomized human, experience, and
from a position well out of reach of any church's authority and sanc­
tions it was for him a rich mine of material for the construction ofhis
own myth. Then he was a collector displaying all a collector's
ardour, as in the case of the Altkatholische Kirche referred to above .
Little as I suppose the Anglican via media would have appealed to
his cast of mind, he must on one occasion in Zurich have attended an
Anglican service, for I remember him telling me how well a certain
consular official read the lessons. Only once did I see a Catholic
priest in the Joyces' lodgings in Zurich. When I called I found
Joyce patiently trying to get a little Belgian priest to talk about
church music, whilst the priest himself insisted on discoursing on the
theme of'une mort tres edifiante' he had just witnessed. I felt that Joyce
was not amused.
August Suter told me that Joyce accompanied him once to a High
Mass at the church of Saint-Sulpice, and that Joyce explained to him
(a Protestant) the meaning of each action as the Mass proceeded.
When asked by August Suter what he regarded as his principal gain
from his Jesuit upbringing, Joyce replied : 'How to gather, how to
order, and how to present a given material. ' A discipline worth
possessing whoever the drill sergeant.
The cosmology, hagiology, and the sacraments of the Christian
religion are built into the fai;ade of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake for all
to see, but it might perhaps one day profitably interest a theologian
to inquire how far the rejected doctrines of the Churches pervade the
inner structure of those works. For example : Is there a Manichaean
leaning in Joyce's 'spirit and nature' duality ? Does he in his treat­
ment of the mystery of fatherhood affirm or deny the consubstantial­
ity of father and son ? And what of the major theme of Finnegans
Wake-the Resurrection ?
For himself, as I say, religion was no longer a problem, but as a·
father (and Joyce was a good father) the problem must have cropped
 FURT H ER RECO L LECT I O N S 353
up again in another form. In his later Paris period he told me that
he had been reproached for not causing his children to be brought
up in the practice of religion. 'But what do they expect me to do ?' he
said. 'There are a hundred and twenty religions in the world. They
can take their choice. I should never try to hinder or dissuade
them. ' This was certainly true, for Joyce would never have denied
to others the freedom he claimed for himself. But perhaps there are
some situations where no completely satisfactory action is possible.
Very sceptical at first when I wrote him from London that I
intended writing a book about Ulysses and the days we spent in
Zurich, Joyce warmed to the project as it took shape, and when the
book got to the stage of reading the galley proofs, he was positively
enthusiastic. In a taxi driving up the Champs Elysees after a sitting
of proofreading, he kept quoting bits of it from memory. And then :
' I never knew you could write so well. It must be due to your associ­
ation with me.' While I was in Switzerland, in Ascona and Zurich,
he dictated to his friend and homme d'ajfaires, Paul Leon, a number of
suggestions which he urged me to work into the proofs. Some of these
I used, others I failed to make use of, partly no doubt on account of
my dilatoriness, but partly also because they were concerned with
music or some other subject I feared to touch because of my ignor­
ance of it. However, used or unused, I appreciated to the full the
generosity that prompted so much proffered assistance.
For about two years during our stay in Switzerland, I met Joyce
almost every day. Later, during his stay in Trieste and during the
early part of his stay in Paris, he kept me informed by letter of the
progress of Ulysses. For about five years after its publication, I lost
touch with Joyce altogether. Then, hearing through Miss Sylvia
Beach that I was in Paris, he wrote asking me to call. He was living
dans ses meubles in the rue de Grenelle. From that time on I saw him
whenever work or some other occasion took me to Paris and also on
several occasions when he came to London.
I found the Joyce of Paris and Finnegans Wake different in many
ways from the Joyce of Zurich and Ulysses. The resounding success
of Ulysses had given him an air of established authority, and the task
of composing Finnegans Wake, often amid weighty family cares, had
taken some of the spontaneous naturalness out of his manner. But
observers change together with things observed, and the flight of
354 JAMES JOYCE
time shows different aspects of all ?f us, though never what isn't
there.
It was some time in the early or middle thirties, I think (I can
never remember dates: only occasions) that on one of our strolls
somewhere near the Etoile Joyce surprised me by starting to talk
bitterly about women in general. I was surprised only because I had
never heard him talk that way before, for lives there a man who has
never let himself go on the subject of womankind at some time or
other ? The interesting thing is always the how and the why and the
how much. On the first of the two occasions I have in mind, he
began with a bitter comment on woman's invasiveness and in general
her perpetual urge to usurp all the functions of the male-all save
that one which is biologically pre-empted, and even on that they
cast jealous threatening eyes. So far nothing unusual. But then he
stopped suddenly in his tracks as peasants and country people
habitually do when they have something especially weighty to
communicate.
'Women write books and paint pictures and compose and perform
music. You know that.'
'Yes, I do,' J said. 'And there are others who have attained
eminence in the field of scientific research. But where does that get
us?'
'It brings me to this point. You have never heard of a woman who
was the author of a complete philosophic system. No, and I don't
think you ever will.'
So that was it. The creator of Molly Bloom and Anna Livia Plura­
belle could never of course be a misogynist. No doubt a recent
sojourn among women who were laying down the law about God
and the universe, or, still worse, attempting to put him right on the
matter of scholastic philosophy, was responsible for the outburst.
But what for me makes the incident particularly worth recording is
Joyce's designation of the demesne of philosophic inquiry as the one
impregnable province of the mind reserved exclusively for the male.
On the occasion of the second blast of the trumpet, I listened to a
similar tirade on the same subject: woman and her urge to rivalize
with menfolk in the things of the mind as well as to dominate them
socially.
'But', I said, 'as I remember you in other days you always fell back
 F URT H ER RE C O L L E C T I O N S 355
upon the fact that the woman's body was desirable and provoking,
whatever else was objectionable about her.'
This produced an impatient 'Ma chef ' and the further comment :
'Perhaps I did. But now I don't care a damn about their bodies.
I am only interested in their clothes.'
Thus Stephen's interest in the 'handful of dyed rags' survives his
interest in the 'squaw' they were pinned round. And when Joyce
said clothes I took it for granted, knowing his bent, that he did not
mean those wondrous garments devised by Dior, Fath, and others
for the social adornment of the female form. I understood him rather
to mean those garments visible only on the clothesline or on privi­
leged private occasions. Throughout his life Joyce remained faithful
to the underclothing of ladies of the Victorian era. Readers of
Ulysses will remember the important part these articles played in that
composition whether gleaming in the gloaming under the navy blue
skirt of Gerty MacDowell or 'redolent of Apoponax' in Molly
Bloom's bedroom. They flutter also through the nightworld pages of
Finnegans Wake. They were to Joyce feminine attributes of even
greater value than the curves and volumes of the female body itself
and certainly, as appears 'from the foregoing, of more abiding inter­
est. Indeed he used, in the Zurich period, to carry a miniature pair
in his trousers pocket until one sad day, as he sadly informed me, he
lost them. A great number ofJoyce's readers and admirers I am told
inhabit the United States of America, and no doubt had he visited
that hospitable country he would have been right royally enter­
tained ; and yet I cannot imagine his ever being wholly at his ease
in a country where the word 'drawers' is applied to those cumber­
some and uninteresting male garments called ' pants' by most of the
inhabitants of the British Isles. For the word was for Joyce a word of
power, and in it lay all the magic of the thing designated by it. To
witness I call one of the pieces of advice he sent to me dictated to
Paul Leon :
'As regards the Nausicaa chapter you will receive a ponderous
volume of some six hundred large pages on the origin and history of
what he chooses to call "Le Manteau de Tanit". He believes that
this subject should be treated by you with I M M E N S E seriousness,
respect, circumspection, historical sense, critical acumen, document­
ary accuracy, citational erudition and sweet reasonableness. . . . '
 JAMES JOYCE
And on the same subject in a further dictated letter : 'St Bernard
wrote, "qui me amat amat et canem meum", but the love philter of
Isolde is alluded to somewhere by her in W i P [Note : Wo rk in
Pro gress] with this free translation "Love me, love mydrugrs" verbum
sap.'

It has often been said of Joyce that he was greatly influenced by

psychoanalysis in the composition of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. If
by that is meant that he made use of the jargon of that science when
it suited the purpose of his fiction, or made use of its practical ana­
lytical devices as when Bloom commits the Fehlleistung of talking
about 'the wife's admirers' when he meant 'the wife's advisers', the
point holds good. But if it is meant that he adopted the theory and
followed the practice of psychoanalysis in his work as did the Dadaists
and the Surrealists, nothing could be farther from the truth. The
Joycean method of composition and the passively automatic method
are two opposite and opposed poles. If psychoanalysis cured sick
people, well and good. Who could quarrel with that ? But Joyce
was always impatient or contemptuously silent when it was talked
about as both an all-sufficient Weltanschauung and a source and law
for artistic production.
'Why all this fuss and bother about the mystery of the uncon­
scious ?' he said to me one evening at the Pfauen restaurant. 'What
about the mystery of the conscious ? What do they know about that ?'
One might say that both as man and artist Joyce was exceedingly
conscious. Great artificers have to be. As I saw him working on
Ulysses I can testify that no line ever left his workshop without having
been the object of a hundredfold scrutiny. And I remember my old
friend August Suter telling me that in the early days of the composi­
tion of Finnegans Wake Joyce said to him, 'I feel like an engineer
boring into a mountain from two sides. If my calculations are
correct we shall meet in the middle. If not. . . .' Whatever philo­
sophy of composition that indicates, it is certainly neither automatic
nor convulsive.
On one occasion I stayed the night in the Joyces' flat in Paris.
Joyce was ill and looked it, and Mrs. Joyce thought that an extra
man in the house might come in handy in case of emergency. The
emergency arose at about eight the next morning. I went into
 F URT H ER RECO L L E CT I O N S 3 57
Joyce's room and found him short of breath, looking very pale with
a cold damp forehead, and evidently holding on to himself very
tightly in a state of intense anxiety. If I had known then what I
learned later in Civil Defence during the war, I should have felt
obliged to suggest first aid treatment for shock. Mrs. Joyce sent me
for a doctor. Lunching with them later in the day I asked Joyce,
then somewhat recovered, what the doctor had said, and Joyce
replied that the doctor had asked him what he was afraid of.
'I told him', said Joyce, 'that I was afraid of losing consciousness,
and he said that from all the signs and symptoms, pulse, tempera­
ture, etc., I had nothing to fear on that score.'
Unlike most natives of the British Isles, Joyce disliked and feared
dogs, perhaps on account of his poor sight and the dog's unpredict­
able temper. He would never go in for his evening treatment in the
eye clinic in the rue du Cherche-Midi until Madame had doubly
assured him that the dog was on the chain. But he had a consider­
able sympathy for the cat with its persuasive manners and its com­
pact self-sufficiencies. One of the waiters at (I think) Fouquets gave
theJoyces a black cat and on my first visit to them after this acquisi­
tion I found Joyce in the middle of the living room putting on an act
of homeless despair.
'Look,' he said, pointing to his chair on which Franc;ois lay curled
up and fast asleep. 'Since this animal came to live with us I haven't
a chair to sit on.' I heard, alas, that Franc;ois had to go. Unlike the
London cat with his countless back gardens, the Paris cat has few
free spaces where he can pursue his loves and wars and practise at
leisure his fastidious sanitary engineering.
Once as we were walking up the Champs Elysees together, I
pointed to a beautiful white goat harnessed to a children's cart and
said how much I admired these courageous and inquisitive crea­
tures. Joyce fully agreed and, stopping to contemplate the stately
little animal, said he couldn't see why the goat had been selected as
a satanic symbol. 'Hircus Civis Eblanensis.' There was a good deal of
the surefootedness and toughness of the mountain goat in Joyce's
own composition and more than a little of the relaxed vigilance of
the cat.
The front thatJoyce presented to the world was anything but that
of the extrovert broth-of-a-boy Irishman of stage and screen, but in
 JAMES JOYCE
Zurich he did occasionally exhibit a certain impishness said to be an
Irish characteristic. In Paris I saw none of this. I have known him,
for example, to tell stories about me to third persons ( certainly not to
my discredit : indeed they were designed to make me out a bigger
man than I am) and then he would tell me what he had told them
and laugh gleefully, expecting me to join in the merriment. One of
these stories was that I was a painter well known in court circles and
that I had received an important commission from King George V
himself. If I shared his merriment in any degree it was not without
a mild fear that the story might get round, and then I should have to
suffer the embarrassment that always lies in wait for the pretender.
Somewhat in the same vein, though quite harmlessly, he always
spoke to me and about me as if I were a Cornishman, and that for
the 50-per-cent insufficient reason that my mother was a Cornish­
woman. I told him often enough that my father was a native of
County Surrey and that I was born and brought up in that county,
and further that I had spent only a few months of my life in the
delectable Duchy. But it made no difference. I was still a Cornish­
man. He would begin sentences with such openings as, 'Your
countryman, King Mark . . .' Or, 'As a Cornishman you'll . . . ' It
was as if he wanted to rope me in to some select Celtic confederacy
in which I certainly did not belong to be-as a Cornishman might
say. But as Joyce himself said in one of his dictations to Leon, 'We
did not sing either "The Wearing of the Green" or "And Shall
Trelawney Die ?" in honour of our respective Irish and Cornish
forbears.' True, we didn't. But that may be explicable in the words
of Calverly:

We never sing the old so ngs no w.

It is no t that we think them lo w,
But because we don't remember how
They go .

Joyce always held that the English never really hated the Germans
even in wartime, but looked on them as belonging to the same family,
cousins perhaps, who were doing pretty well for themselves, maybe a
bit too well, on the mainland of Europe.
Joyce associated a good deal with such Greeks as were available
in wartime Zurich, for he thought they all had a streak of Ulysses in
 F U R T HER RECOL LEC T IONS 359
them. Although he knew some Greek he was not a Greek scholar by
high academic standards. By chance one day I stumbled on the fact
that this was a sore point with him. I told him that I left school and
went to work in my thirteenth year, but that the only thing I re­
gretted about my lack of schooling was that I was never able to learn
Greek. He thereupon regretted his insufficient knowledge of that
language but, as ifto underline the difference in our two cases (or so
I interpreted it) , he said with sudden vehemence : 'But just think :
isn't that a world I am peculiarly fitted to enter ?' As a work of
reference for his Ulysses he used the Butcher-Lang translation of the
Odyssey.
He joined Pearse's Irish class in Dublin, but said of Pearse that 'in
a classroom he was a bore.' He told me that he couldn't stand
Pearse's continual mockery of the English language, instancing in
particular Pearse's ridiculing of the English word 'thunder' . This
was probably the limit, for as all readers ofFinnegans Wake can testify
thunder was for Joyce a word laden with very big magic. He
soon abandoned Irish in favour of Norwegian which he studied to
such purpose that later he was able to translate James Stephens's
poem, 'The Wind on Stephen's Green', into Norwegian (as well as
into Latin, Italian, German, and French) . In any case Norwegian
was for him an obvious choice as an alternative, for he regarded his
native Dublin as fundamentally a Scandinavian city.
I have commented elsewhere on Joyce's reactions to the criticisms
of Clutton Brock and H. G. Wells, but his remark when I mentioned
Wyndham Lewis's criticism of Ulysses is worth recordin g : 'Allowing
that the whole of what Lewis says about my book is true, is it more
than ten per cent of the truth ?'
Joyce rarely referred to the work of his contemporaries. There is,
however, a comment on Proust in a letter written to me in 1 920. It
reads : 'I observe a furtive attempt to run a certain Mr. Marcel
Proust of here against the signatory of this letter. I have read some
pages of his. I cannot see any special talent but I am a bad critic.'
Joyce's first and, as far as I am aware, only meeting with Marcel
Proust took place shortly after the end of the First World War at an
evening party given by a wealthy Parisian lady in honour of the
Russian ballet, then all the rage in Paris as elsewhere. The evening
wore on and Joyce, having had a few drinks, was thinking of going
 JAMES J OYCE
home when in walked Marcel Proust dressed to the nines. Their
hostess introduced them, and some of the guests gathered round to
listen to what they thought might be brilliant conversation. 'Our
t;lk', saidJoyce, 'consisted solely of the word "No". Proust asked me
if I knew the due de so-and-so. I said, "No". Our hostess asked
Proust if he had read such and such a piece of Ulysses. Proust said,
"No". And so on. Of course the situation was impossible. Proust's
day was just beginning. Mine was at an end.' Poor visibility for
stargazers.
Very soon after I had made his acquaintance in Zurich, Joyce and
I were taking an evening stroll on the Bahnhofstrasse when the con­
versation turned upon the variants of the comic sense possessed by
different nations. Joyce retold me a funny story told him by my
friend and colleague, Horace Taylor, at that time in Zurich, and as
Taylor was an Englishman Joyce supposed that it was a typically
English funny story. Joyce didn't think it was funny at all, nor did
I, another Englishman, for that matter, though I forget what it was
-something about a man falling out of a window, I think. Then
Joyce went on to tell me the story of how Buckley shot the Russian
general in its original spit and sawdust taproom Irish idiom, a story
which he regarded as exemplifying the exclusively Irish sense of the
comic. He retells the story with baroque exuberance in the dream
idiom of Finnegans Wake, following its manifold implications in the
Taff-Shem Butt-Shaun dialogue, and the metamorphosis the story
undergoes furnishes as good an example as any of the treatment the
common stuff of life receives at Joyce's hands in that composition.
Here is the story, in substance, in ordinary language and in paren­
theses some relevant passages from the Taff-Butt rendering of it.
Buckley on duty in the trenches before Sevastopol sights a high­
ranking Russian officer coming into the open ('With all his canno­
ball wappents. In his raglanrock and his malakoiffed bulbsbyg and
his varnashed roscians and his cardigans blousejagged and his scarlett
manchokuffs and his treecoloured camiflag and his perikopendolous
gaelstorms'), a general at least, and Buckley notes that he is about to
obey a call of nature. ('Foinn duhans ! I grandthinked after his
obras after another time about the itch in his egondoom he was leg­
ging boldylugged from some pulversporochs and lyoking for a stool­
eazy for to nemesisplotsch allafranka and for to salubrate himself
 F URT HER REC O L LECT I O N S
with an ultradungs heavenly mass at his base by a suprime pomp­
ship . . . . ') Now_ was the time for Buckley to do his duty as a soldier.
There's the enemy. Whatever he's doing fire at him. But one touch
of nature makes the whole world kin, and Buckley hasn't the heart to
shoot a man in just that hour of need. ('But, meac Coolp, Arram of
Eirzerum, as I love our Deer Dirouchy, I confesses withould pride­
j ealice when I looked upon the Saur of all the Haurousians with the
weight of his arge fullin upon him from the travaillings of his tom­
muck and rueckenased the fates of a bosser there was fear on me the
sons of Nuad for him and it was heavy he was for me then the way I
immingled my Irmenial hairmaierians ammongled his Gospolis
fomiliours till, achaura moucreas, I adn't the arts to . . . .') So far,
out of sympathy with a fellow mortal, Buckley has just looked on and
has done nothing. But when he sees the Russian general claw up a
piece of turf to make his parts clean his Irish temper boils up. He
goes mad and ups with his gun and shoots the Russian general, pre­
sumably where Frankie shoots Johnnie in the well-known ballad.
('For when meseemim, and tolfoklokken rolland allover ourloud's
lande, beheaving up that sob of tunf for to claimhis, for to wollpim­
solff, puddywhuck. Ay, and untuoning his culothone in an exitous
erseroyal Deo Jupto. At that instullt to Igorladns ! Prronto ! I gave
one dobblenotch and I ups with my crozzier. Mirrdo ! With my
how on armer and hits leg an arrow cockshock rockrogn. Sparro !
. . .')
With regard to the language used by Joyce, particularly in Finne­
gans Wake, it is sometimes forgotten that in his early years in Dublin
Joyce lived among the believers and adepts in magic gathered round
the poet Yeats. Yeats held that the borders of our minds are always
shifting, tending to become part of the universal mind, and that the
borders of our memory also shift and form part of the universal mem­
ory. This universal mind and memory could be evoked by symbols.
When telling me thisJoyce added that in his own work he never used
the recognized symbols, preferring instead to use trivial and quad­
rivia! words and local geographical allusions. The intention of
magical evocation, however, remained the same.
In spite of his more than semi-blindness,Joyce had a natural feel­
ing for the visual arts. He once asked me to paint for him a salmon
(an avatar of H.C.E.) and I promised him that I would, but, alas, I
 JAMES JOYCE
never managed to fulfil my promise. My only excuse is that a whole
salmon is a very big lump of fish and costs a lot of money. Besides,
my family seeing me come home with one would be looking forward
to salmon steaks, and in all likelihood by the time I had finished get­
ting the noble fish on to canvas I should have had to bury it in the
garden. But of one thing I am sure: Joyce would never have been
satisfied with a picture of a disintegrated and synthetically recon­
structed salmon. He loved and admired the natural appearance of
the fish. 'A salmon is a wonderful thing,' he said to me, 'so full and
smooth and silvery.' August Suter told me that when Tuohy was
painting Joyce's portrait he started talking about the poet's soul.
'Get the poet's soul out of your mind,' said Joyce, 'and see that you
paint my cravat properly.'
But, as is well known, the art that made the greatest appeal to him,
apart from his own art of words, was the art of singing-singing with
any voice, but particularly with the tenor voice, as all his work bears
witness. He could admire in a certain measure and some aspects the
art of Count MacCormack, 'the tuning fork among tenors' as he
called him in one piece he wrote and 'the prince of drawing room
singers' once in talking to me. But his overwhelming enthusiasm was
reserved for another countryman of his, Mr. Sullivan, for many
years singer of leading tenor roles at the Paris Opera. This enthusi­
asm has already been alluded to by myself and others who have
written about Joyce, but to what lengths it led him may be seen
from the following description of a certain evening at the Paris
Opera when Sullivan was singing the part of Arnold in Rossini's
William Tell. In one of his letters to me dictated to Paul Leon, Joyce
said: 'Perhaps Leon who is typing this will shoot you off a pen­
picture describing my antics in the stalls of the Paris Opera for the
scandal of the blase-abonne, and the ensuing story in the press.' Here
is the pen-picture duly shot off by Leon and no doubt checked by
Joyce:

Late spring three years ago [Note: That would be 1930. F.B.J
J. J. coming back from Z'ch after a second visit to Vogt [Note:
Dr. Vogt, the famous eye specialist. F. B.J-sight maybe a little
better.
Concert of Volpi heard. Also much talk about a performance of
William Tell with Volpi in the part of Arnold. Conversations with
 FURT HER RE C O L LEC T I O N S
Sullivan establish that Volpi had the entire score cut by some half
of it and the key lowered by a half note. This Volpi performance
is narrated with all sorts of compliments in the N. Y. Herald (Paris
edition) by their official musical critic (M. Louis Schneider) .
Immediately a letter is written to him containing a wager by
Sullivan to let him and Volpi sing both the part of Arnold in the
original score in any concert hall-the arbiter to be Mr. Schneider
-and the stakes to be a copy of the original full score, nicely
bound. Naturally no reply from either Schneider or Volpi (con­
sidering Schneider had written that nobody at present could sing
the part of Arnold as had been done by Volpi) .
A week later-performance of Guillaume Tell with Sullivan.
Sitting in the fifth row right aisle next to the passage your obedient
servant next to him J. J. next to him, Mrs. Leon and next to her
Mrs. ].-somewhere in the stalls an Irish Miss correspondent of
some paper, and a gentleman correspondent of the Neue Zilricher
Zeitung.
First and second act pass with great applause, ]. J. being greatly
enthused. Third act where there is no Sullivan on the stage spent
in the buffet.
Fourth Act after the aria 'Asile hereditaire' sung with great brio
and real feeling by S. applause interminable. J. J. excited to the
extreme shouts, 'Bravo Sullivan-Merde pour Lauri Volpi'. The
abonnes (this being I believe a Friday) rather astonished, one of
them saying: Il va un peu fort celui-la.
Half an hour later: at the Cafe de la Paix. Great conversation
in which S. joins after he has changed clothes. At the moment of
parting the Neue Zilricher Zeitung correspondent having been
talked to all the evening about music approaches J. J. with the
following words:
The Correspondent: Thank you so much for the delightful
evening. I have some pull with my paper and should you wish I
could arrange for an article or two by you to appear there about
your Paris impressions:
J. J.: Many thanks but I never write for the newspapers.
The Correspondent: Oh ! I see you are simply a musical critic.
Next day an article in the press. M. J. J. returned from Z'ch
after a successful operation goes with friends to the Opera to hear
his compatriot S. sing William Tell. Sitting in a box. After the
fourth act aria he takes off his spectacles and is heard saying:
'Thank God I have recovered my eyesight.'

I always felt that originally Joyce was of an open, impulsive

nature, but as we all know natures have a way of being modified by
experience as well as of being subdued to what they work in, like the
 J AMES J O YCE
dyer's hand, and therefore I suppose that a spontaneous utterance of
the naturalJoyce might easily be checked and stifled by an acquired
defensiveness. This is an attempt to explain in advance something
that occurred during one of my visits to Paris in the early thirties.
Joyce and I were alone in his apartment, and while I was looking at
a book during a lull in the conversation he broke the silence with:
'When you get an idea, have you ever noticed what I can make of
it ?' I looked up and waited for him to go on, feeling rather pleased
with myself that I should have any ideas of such a calibre. But
instead of going on he.walked back and forth across the room, looked
out of the window and changed the subject. I wish I had asked him
there and then exactly what he meant, for it has cost me a lot of
cogitation since then to arrive at a conclusion as to what the idea
might be. Quite certainly it was an idea having a bearing onFinne­
gans Wake, and an important bearing at that-something funda­
mental. The words, phrases, anecdotes, snatches of song, and such­
like that he picked up every day from somebody or other were so
numerous that he would have considered them hardly worth men­
tioning, and in any case he would not have used the word 'idea' in
connection with them. I come finally to rest on two possibilities.
He may have been thinking of a talk we had in a cafe near the
Amtshaus in Zurich . I told him on that occasion how much my
dreams interested me, and explained the difficulty I had in making
a written record of them. All the dream quality went out of them as
soon as I turned them into a string of time-bound sentences. This is
one guess. In any case I have always felt that at that session some
seed was sown that later was to blossom into the dream language of
Finnegans Wake. 'That was the prick of the spindle to me that gave
me the keys to dreamland.' It could be. Why not ? There must be
germ carriers also in the realm of ideas. Or it may have been a poem
of mine I once showed him in which I tried to express a state of mind
between sleeping and waking. I called the poem 'At the Gates of
Sleep', and it ended with the words 'Sleep is best'. If in the first
guess, the suggestion was for the dream material of Finnegans Wake,
in the case of the second guess the suggestion would be for the time-
place to be inhabited by his ' . . . twin eternities of spirit and nature
expressed in the twin eternities of male and female.' The quotation
is from S tephen Hero . Tracing a work of genius to its source is like
 F U R T HER RECOL LECT IONS
searching for the source of a river. Eventually we come as with
Anna Livia Plurabelle to the principle of evaporation and condensa­
tion working through the sea and the sky. But in a rough and ready
way it is true that the original inspiration for all Joyce's work is
always to be sought in the imaginings of his boyhood and adolescence
in Dublin. The idea, of course, may have been in some word or other
I let fall and forgot as soon as uttered, for, as he wrote to me during
the composition of the Circe episode of Ulysses : 'A word is enough to
set me off.' However, if both my guesses are wrong then Joyce's
moment of inhibition must take the blame for my vain cogitations.
I talked with Joyce for the last time in the spring of 1939 when,
having a little money 1n hand, and sensing that the outbreak of war
was near, I went to Paris to see the city all artists love before enemy
bombs should mar her noble skyline. It turned out otherwise, but
that is the way some of us foresaw it at the time. Joyce was living in
a flat in Passy. When I called on him, a copy of Finnegans Wake fresh
from the printers lay on the table. In the course of the afternoon he
asked me to read aloud to him Anna Livia's monologue as she passes
out by day to lose her individual identity in the ocean whence she
came. No doubt he knew every word of it by heart, and no doubt I
blundered in the reading of it, but he let me go on to the end without
interruption. It was perhaps the first time he had heard the words
spoken by any voice other than his own. The last I saw ofJoyce was ,
his wave from a taxi late that afternoon.
I was to write an article on Finnegans Wake when I got back to
London, but I found it heavy going with war a practical certainty
looming close ahead. Later in 1939 Joyce and his family began that
series of moves that were to end in Zii.rich in r9 4 I . His self-exile in
Europe may be said to have begun in 'noble Turricum abounding in
all manner of merchandise', and there it ended. He wrote me, though
not frequently, during 1939 from Etretat, from Berne, and finally
(as far as my record goes) from Gerand-le-Puy in the Allier-about
literary reactions to Finnegans Wake, about his family anxieties (both
his daughter and his daughter-in-law were ill), but never a word
about the war, not even the most guarded reference. His entry into
Switzerland was referred to in the press. Then came news of his
sudden illness. A paragraph in the Evening Standard announcing his
death was shown to me in the dugout where I was standing by to
366 JAME S JOY C E
report air-raid damage. When I met Mrs. Joyce in Zurich after the
war, she told me that during the day preceding the sudden onset of
his fatal seizure Joyce had been to an exhibition of French nine­
teenth-century painting. Somehow there seems to me to be an
affinity there, I mean between French nineteenth-century painters
and Joyce, in the sense that all the work of his imagination and
intellect was rooted, as was theirs, in a natural sensibility.
1 955
 INDEX

Addison, Joseph, 227 Crowhurst, Surrey, 193

A. E. (George Russell), 103, 110-13 Cubism, 132, 156, 198, 251
'Agenbite of Inwit', 41, 134, 272
Altkatholische Kirche, 5, 173, 351-2 Dadaists, 27, 198, 356
Aquinas, St. Thomas, 55 d'Albert, Eugen Francis Charles, 26
Aristotle, 109 d'Annunzio, Gabriel, 184
Dante Alighieri, 181, 184
Bach, Johann Sebastian, 186 Darwin, Charles, 236, 254, 277
Balfour, A.J., 181 Daumier, Honore, 275, 335
Balzac, Honore de, 15, 61, 130, 184, 287 Defoe, Daniel, 186, 318
Beethoven, Ludwig van, 186 De Quincey, Thomas, 181, 227, 294
Bennett, Arnold, 72 De Vries, Juda (alias Joe Martin, alias
Beran, Felix, 12-13 Jules Moreau), 29
Blake, William, 25, 65, 73, 306, 318-20 Dial, The, 204
Boccioni, Umberto, 198 Dickens, Charles, 73, 130, 228
Bocklin, Arnold, 28 Disraeli, Benjamin, 285
Borrow, George, 70 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 15, 61, 130, 184,
British Consulate, Zurich, g, 10, 14, 30, 191
155, 199-205, 343 Dublin, 65, 69-72, 124-6, 128-9, 130-
Browning, Robert, 201 131, 137, 183, 233, 289, 317, 318-
Bruno, Giordano, 335, 340 19, 329-30, 332, 339, 359, and
Buchner, Georg, 25 passim
Bunyan, John, 226 Dubliners, 19, 36, 58, 69, 71, 339, 341 ,
Busoni, Ferruccio, 26, 38 343, 344; 'Araby', 71; 'The Boarding
Byron, Lord, 268 House', 103 ; 'The Dead', 71, 341-2 ;
'An Encounter', 71; 'Grace', 87;
Carducci, Count, 140 'Ivy Day in the Committee Room',
Caruso, Enrico, 140 87, go; 'The Sisters', 58; 'Two
Cendrars, Blaise, 10 Gallants', 142, 257
Chapelizod, xvii, 4, 309-11, 319, 330 Dudley, Lord, 123-6, 160
Chatterton, Thomas, 22 Dujardin, Edouard, 94
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 73, 130, 186, 195
Clutton-Brock, Arthur, 76, 359
Corn magnifique, Le (Crommelynck), 287, Einstein, Albert, 323
350 Eleano r Thomas, 229
Coleridge, S. T., 182 Ellmann, Richard, xvi
Comerford (of Cork), 189 English Players, the, 35, 200-5, 346
Constable, John, 11 Exiles, 19, 343, 349-50
Cornwall, 48, 358
Corot, Jean Baptiste Camille, 138, 189 Farinelli, Carlo, 140
Criterion, The, 289 Faust, 16
"368 I NDEX
Fedora (Giordano) , 1 8 Ibsen, Henrik, 1 30, 183-4, 186
Fehr, Professor Bernhard, xv Impressionists, ix-x, 93, 2 5 1 , 366
Feilbogen, Sigmund, xiv-xv, 29 interior monologue, 93-5, 323, and
Fenians, see Sinn Fein passim
Finn egans Wake, 323-42, 343, 347, 348,
35 1 , 353, 360-1 , 364, 365; Anna .Jacobsen, Jacob, 1 84
Livia Plurabelle, 1 82, 3 1 3 ; The Mime
Jarnach, Philip, 38
qf Mick Nick and the Maggies, 33 1 ; Jews and Judaism, 46, 60, 66, 77, 78,
CHARACTERS : Anna Livia Plura­ 1 06, 1 48-9, 1 65, 168, 1 74, 256, 261 ,
belle, 300, 304- 5, 309, 3 1 6, 3 3 1 , 274, 279-80, 284, 346
3 33-4, 337, 341-2, 354, 365 ; Hum­ John, Augustus, 1 89
phrey Chimpden Earwicker (H. C.E . ) , Jolas, Eugene, ix
295, 30 1-5, 308-9, 3 1 6, 3 1 7, 332,Jonson, Ben, 1 86
3 37, 339, 340, 36 1 ; Shaun the Post,Joyce, Giorgio, 36-7, 189
viii, 295-8, 30 1 , 306, 3 1 7, 33 1 , 334,
JOYCE, JAMES, vii-xix, 3-5, 9-22, 29,
336, 337, 351 ; Shem the Penman, 35-8, 48-57, 6 1 , 1 06-8, 1 09, 1 37-41 ,
viii, 295, 298, 3 1 3, 3 16, 3 1 7, 33 1, 154- 6, 170-206, 220, 223, 230- 1 ,
334-6, 337, 343-4, 35 1 . 234, 238, 246-8, 258, 262, 269, 272,
See also 'Work in Progress'. 287, 289, 2 91 , 3 16-1 7, 3 1 8-20, 323-
Flaubert, Gustave, 1 5, 20, 6 1 , 1 30, 1 8 1 ,
324, 326, 328, 330, 342, 343-8;
184, 1 86, 245-6, 252, 287, 341 appearance, 1 1- 1 2, 343; singing
Fleiner, Fritz, 26 voice, 9, 1 8, 1 35, 1 8 1 -2 ; dancing,
Fletcher, Phineas, 1 3- 1 4, 2 1 , 265 1 94-5 ; humour, 1 93-4, 344, 358;
Fragonard, Jean Honore, 2 l 9 memory, 180- 1 , 2 1 8 ; linguistic ac­
Frank, Leonhard, 27 complishments, 1 82-3, 359; sexual
Freud, Sigmund, 238 obsessions, x, xv- xvi, 1 08, 355-6 ;
Futurism, 132, 1 56, 1 98, 25 1 , 328 fear of dogs, 54, 345, 357, of thunder,
345 ; taste in wine, 1 72, in literature,
1 83-6, in art, 1 87-90, in music, xvi,
Gilbert, Stuart, xvi, 4, 349, 350
1 39-41 , 186- 7 ;
Gluck, Christophe Willibald von, 1 87 and politics, 1 54, 1 9 1-2, 339, 345-
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 1 6, 25,
346 ; and religion, xi, 18, 1 9 1 , 2 1 0,
63, 252, 291
352-3; and Jews, 346 ; and Greeks,
Gogarty, Oliver St. John, 348
1 73-4, 358-g ; and women, 354-6;
Goldsmith, Oliver, 200
and critics, 1 08 ; and Dublin, 69,
Gonne, Maude, 82
1 24-5, 1 28-g, 1 83, 3 1 8- 1 9, 332, 359 ;
Gosse, Sir Edmund, 200
and Ireland, 1 55-6 ;
Goya, Francisco Jose, 6 1
domestic life, 36-8, 182, 1 88, 346,
G.P.O., London, xix, 297
352-3 ; eye trouble, 177, 1 78, 345,
Grayson, Rupert, 3
362-3 ; visit to Locarno, 1 77, 1 8 1 ,
Greeks, in Zurich, 1 73-5, 358-g
1 93, 247-8 ; and English Players,
Griffith, Arthur, 77, 1 65, 1 68, 2 7 1
200-5, 346 ; dispute with British
Consulate, 1 4, 1 99-205, 343; and
Hamlet, see under Shakespeare 1 9 14-18 War, 1 2, 1 7 1 , 346 ; in Tri­
Harmsworth, Alfred, 3 1 0, 330 este, 1 75, 230; in Paris, 4, 23 1 , 234,
Hodler, Ferdinand, 25 353-4, 356, _ 365 ; death in Zurich,
Holderlin, Johann Christian Friedrich, 3�, 365-6 ;
1 82 method of composition, 20, �-9,
Homer, see Odyssey 1 23, 1 24-5, 1 75-8 1 , 3 1 2-14, 356;
Hummel, Danni, 1 73, 182 view of his characters, 75-6, 1 1 8,
 I NDEX
1 4 7; an<\ interior monologue, 93-5 ; Mestrovic, I van, 1 87
and dreams, 239-40, 324, 364; as Meyer, Conrad Ferdinand, 26
impressionist, 92-3, 366; self-portrait Michelangelo, 98, 1 22, 1 86
in his books, 6 1 -5, 335, 343 Milton, John, 44, 1 37, 1 8 1 , 226
Joyce, John Stanislaus, 187, 1 89, 330 Ministry of Information, British, 1 1 ,
Joyce, Lucia, xiii, 3, 36-7, 1 25, 1 89, 34-5, 1 70
195, 35 1 , 365 moly, 234, 236-7
Joyce, Nora Barnacle, x, X\'.iii, 37-8, Moore, George, 68, 70, 1 84, 200
172, 1 89, 1 90, 200, 348, 356-7, 363, Moser, Karl, 26
366 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 76, 186
Jung, Carl Gustav, 26, 74 J\itinzenberg, Willy, 27
Myselves When Yo ung (Budgen), viii,
Keller, Gottfried, 26, 28 xviii
Kerridge, W. H., g, 18, 138
Kipling, Rudyard, 70, 132 Navire d'Argent, Le, 289
Kirwan, Patrick, 3 Newman, John Henry, 1 8 1
Kleist, Heinrich von, 25, I 7 1 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 26, 7 3 , 243, 285,
Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb, 25 341
Lamb, Charles, 227
Landseer, Sir Edwin Henry, 54 O'Connell, Daniel, 1 60, 189
Larbaud, Valery, 93 Ot[yssey, xix, 1 5, 20, 94, 1 74, 247, 262,
Laurencin, Marie, 189 359; CHARACTERS : Calypso, 1 6 ;
Lauri-Volpi, Giacomo, 363 Nausikaa, 1 7 ; Penelope, 1 6, 1 1 o , 1 1 5,
Lavater, John Caspar, 25 1 88, 267 ; Telemachus, 1 6, 39, 262 ;
Lawrence, D. H., 269 Ulysses, xviii-xix, 1 5-18, 1 69, 188,
Lefanu, Sheridan, 3 1 0, 330 220, 234, 236-7, 262, 264, 267, 284
Lehmbruck, Wilhelm, 26-7 'Oorri Jan' (Oom Paul, restaurateur),
Lenin, V. I., 27 xiv, 28-g
Lenz (butcher), xiii, xiv, 29
Leon, Paul, ix, xii, xiii, xv, xvi, 4, 348, Padua, University of, 345
353, 355, 358, 362 Palestrina, Giovanni Pierluigi, 1 8 1 ,
Lewis, Wyndham, 13, 60, 1 30, 1 89, 359 1 86-7
Liffey, river, 69, 1 28-9, 290, 309-10, Paris Opera, 5, 362-3
3 1 9, 324 Parnell, Charles Stewart, go, 1 03, 1 53,
Little Review, The, 36, 39, 48, 5 7, 1 82 1 9 1 , 260, 277
Lloyd George, David, 202 Pater, Walter, 228
Lugne-Poe, A. F., 350 Pearse, Padraic, 1 83, 359
Pestalozzi, Johann Heinrich, 26
Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 1 8 1 Pfauen Cafe, Zilrich, 1 39, 1 7 1-3, 1 93-4,
Malthus, T . R., 222 348
Mangan, James Clarence, 1 82 Picasso, Pablo, 1 89
Marx, Karl, 1 53, 284, 285, 345 Plato, 1 09
Matisse, Henri, 2 1 7 Parnes Penyeach, 1 95, 20 1
McCormack, John, xvi, 1 37, 362 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A, g,
McCormick, Edith Rockefeller, xiii- 1 9-20, 39, 48, 57-9, 6 1 , 72, 87, 93,
xiv, 28 108, 1 53, 1 98, 202, 225, 3 1 7, 339,
McCormick, Harold F., xiv, 28 343, 344
Mephistopheles, 1 6 Pound, Ezra, 1 g
Meredith, George, 47, 1 14 Proust, Marcel, 1 9 1 , 359-60
3 70 I N DEX
Quinet, Edgar, 1 8 1 Sykes, Mrs. Claude (Daisy Race) , 35,
1 72, 200
Rabelais, Frarn,ois, 269 Synge, J. M., r 14, 200
Rawson, Tristan, xiv, 28, 200
Rembrandt, 1 78---g Tagore, Rabindranath, xvii
Reszke, Jean de, 1 87 Taxi!, Leo, 5 1
Richardson, Henry Handel, 7 r Taylor, Horace, 9-1 r , 1 3, 14, 1 8, 1 80,
Rodin, Auguste, 65, 9 1 -2, 2 1 7, 2 1 8, 339 1 99, 360
Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio, 362 ; Thackeray, William Makepeace, 185
Guillaume Tell, 5, 347 Thersites, 1 58, 1 69
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 184 · Tit-bits, 80-1 , 242
Rowlandson, Thomas, 68, 99, 225, 275, Tolstoy, Leo, 1 5, 70, 1 52, 1 84
335 Transatlantic Review, The, 289
Ruggiero, Paul, r 74-5 transition, ix, 239, 28g, 298
Ruskin, John, 228 Tucker, Benjamin, 192
Tuohy, Patrick, 1 89, 362
Sargent, Louis and Katherine, r 73, Turner,Joseph Mallord William, r r
180, 1 90
Sauermann, Charlotte, 38 Ulysses, ix-xvii, xix, xxi, 3-320 passim,
Shakespeare, William, 15, 47, 57, 6 1 , 323, 330 ;
73, I I 0- 1 8, I 1 9-22, 180; 1 83-4, 29 1 , EPISODES_ : Aeolus, 95-9, 1 00, 109-
3 1 3 ; Coriolanus, n 6 ; Cymbeline, 1 1 0, I r o ; Calypso, 76-8 1 , 108; Circe, 149,
1 2 1 ; Hamlet, 16, 83, 1 09-1 8, 1 2 1-2, 197, 1 98, 231-54, 365 ; Cyclops, 1 35,
2 r r, 238, 243, 262; King Lear, 1 1 3, 1 5 1-2, 1 56-69, 1 70, 1 85, 197, 207,
r 22; Macbeth, 1 22, 238, 252 ; Othello, 346 ; Eumaeus, 255-62; Hades, 86-95 ;
I I 3, 1 2 1 , 1 2 2 ; Troilus and Cressida, Ithaca, 22 r, 263-8 ; Lestrygonians, 20-
1 1 3, 1 22, 1 69 2 1 , r oo-6, 343 ; Lotus Eaters, xvii,
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 13, 1 82 8 1-6; Nausikaa, xvi, 36, 207-20, 230,
Shrewsbury, Arthur, 15, 343 355 ; Nestor, 44-7; Oxen ef the Sun,
Silvestri, Tullio, r 89 xxi, 22, 72, 1 79, 220-9, 230 ; Penelope,
Sinn Fein, 75, 1 3 1 , 1 53-4, 1 65, 168, xxi, 166, 268-72 ; Proteus, 47-8, 49,
198 r 76 ; Scylla and Charybdis, 109-22; The
Sordina, Count Francesco de, 1 75 Sirens, 1 35-6, 1 3 7-g, 1 41-50, 1 5 1 ,
Spitteler, Carl, 26 186, 234, 350 ; Telemachus, 39-43,
Stadttheater, Zurich, g, 18, 24, 36, 38, 109, r 1 8 ; The Wandering Rocks, 1 23-
1 38 1 35, 1 42 ;
Steele, Richard, 227 PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS : Leopold
Stephen Hero, 364 Bloom, x-xi, xix, 20-2, 65-7, 70, 74-
Stephens, James, 326, 359 9 1 , 92-3, 95-7, 99, r oo-6, 1 07-8, 1 1 5,
Sterne, Laurence, 19, 73, 2 1 9, 227, 288, I I8, 1 27, 1 29, 1 33, 1 35, 1 42-50, 1 5 1 -
338 1 52, 1 5 7-66, 1 6 7-g, 208-20, 221-9,
Strindberg, August, 252 231-4, 236-8, 241-6, 248-54, 255-
Sullivan, John, 6, 1 6, 1 37, 187, 347, 262, 263-8, 270-2, 274-88, 3 1 7, 323,
362-3 330, 339, 340, 346, 350; Marion
Surrealists, 356 (Molly) Bloom, xii, xxi, 2 1 , 22, 38,
Suter, August, 1 0, 26, 30, 1 73, 1 80, 188, 66-7 , 68, 73, 77, 79, 83, 85, 88, go,
190, 195, 230, 347, 352, 356, 362 g r , 92-3, 1 03, 1 08, 1 33, 1 35, 145,
Suter, Paul, 1 72, 1 82, 188, 1 93 1 49-50, 1 67, 208, 232, 248, 259, 264,
Swift, Jonathan, 19, 1 85, 2 1 9, 226 266, 267-72, 277, 282, 286, 334, 339,
Sykes, Claude, 35, 1 72, 200, 20 1 350, 354, 355 ; Millicent Bloom, 66,
 IN D EX 37 1
67, 80, 1 05, 228, 232, 248, 278, 279 ; Van Gogh, Vincent, 196
Blazes Boylan, 68, 79, 88, 1 0 1 , 103, Verlaine, Paul, 1 8 1
1 05, 1 06, 1 07, 127, 1 33, 1 35, 1 42, Vermeer, Jan, 189
1 45, 147, 167, 208, 248, 249, 257, 266, Vico, Giambattista, 222, 340
270, 279, 282, 286, 350; the Citizen, Vogt, Dr. Alfred, 362
68, 1 5 7, 1 58-66, 1 97, 208, 258, 259,
275, 346 ; Martha Clifford, 83-4, 102, Wagner, Richard, 25-6, 76, 187; Das
1 06, 141, 1 42, 146, 1 50, 2 1 5, 242 ; Rheingold, 53, 1 87
Mr. Deasy, 42-3, 45-7, 48, 56, 97, Weininger, Otto, 53
1 1 3, 1 1 8, 1 79, 226; Simon Dedalus, Wells, H. G., 1 9, 1 08, 359
67, 78, 87, 96, 100, 1 27, 1 33-4, 1 37, Whistler, ]. McNeill, 1 93, 2 1 9
142, 1 44, 1 45--6, 256, 334; Stephen Wiederkehr, Paul, 1 72
Dedalus, xix, 39-48, 49-57, 60-1, 65, . Wieland, Christoph Martin, 25
70, 87, 92-3, 97-9, 1 07, 1 09-2 1 , 1 2 7, Wilde, Oscar, 193, 201, 205
1 29, 1 3 1 , 1 33, 1 34-5, 1 49, 1 52-3, 'Work in Progress', xiii, xv, xvi, 86, 1 36,
1 76, 1 79, 1 90, 1 98, 2 1 1 , 221-8, 2 3 1 , 140, 1 54, 2 18, 239, 240, 289-320,
233, 238, 242, 245, 249-5 1 , 253, 356; and see Finnegans Wake
255-7, 259--62, 263-5, 281, 283, 285,
287, 292, 298, 3 1 5, 3 1 7, 329, 343,
355 ; Haines, 40, 43, 48, 52, 55, 68, Yeats, Jack B., 189
1 09, 1 29, 227, 233 ; Gerty MacDowell, Yeats, William Butler, 182, 200, 3 1 8,
208-19, 223, 241, 26 1 , 282, 30 1 , 355 ; 348, 36 1
Malachi (Buck) Mulligan, 39-40, 42,
43, 47, 48, 52, 53, 56, 68, 73, 87, 1 09, Zola, Emile, 2 1 3
I 1 4-18, 1 29, 225, 226-8, 233, 255, Zollikon, 23, 24, 26
26 1 ; the Nameless One, 68, 157--66, Zurich, xiii-xv, 4, 23-30, 33-4, 137-8,
1 69, 258, 275 1 70-205 passim, 323, 343, 347-8, 365
Universita del Popolo, Trieste, 3 1 8 Zwingli, Huldreich, 25
 '

JJ

James Joyce, skctcl\ed by

the author in Zi.irich, 1919