The Backgrounds of UlyssesAuthor(s): Richard EllmannReviewed work(s):Source: The Kenyon Review, Vol. 16, No. 3 (Summer, 1954), pp. 337-386Published by: Kenyon CollegeStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4333502 .Accessed: 12/03/2012 04:18

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THE KENYON REVIEW Vol. XVI SUMMER, 1954 No. 3

Richard Ellmann

THE BACKGROUNDS OF ULYSSES

1. The Artist's Otvwn Body

WHEN the British Broadcasting Company was preparing to present a long program on Joyce, its representatives

went to Dublin and approached Dr. Richard Best, sometime director of the National Library, to ask him to participate in a radio interview. "What makes you come to me?" he asked. "What makes you think I have any connection with this man Joyce?" "But you can't deny your connection," said the men of the B.B.C. "After all, you're a character in Ulysses." Best drew him- self up and retorted, "I am not a character in fiction. I am a living being."

The incident is a warning. Even with a roman a' clef, which Ulysses largely is, no key quite fits. Art, more cavalier even than time, lavishes on one man another's hair, or voice, or bearing, with shocking disrespect for individual identity. Like Stephen in the Circe episode, art shatters light through the world, destroy- ing and creating at once. So, when Dubliners asked each other in trepidation after the book appeared, "Are you in it?" or "Am I in it?" the answer was hard to give. A voice sounded familiar for an instant, a name seemed to belong to a friend, then both

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receded into a new being. As Finneganls Wake reminds us, "The traits featuring the chiaroscuro coalesce, their contrarieties elim- inated, in one stable somebody." Even the personages who retain their actual names, like Dr. Best himself, are often altered; so Best is depicted as saying ceaselessly, "Doni't you know"' not because this was one of his expressions, which it was not, but because it seemed to Joyce, still pique(d at Best's refusal to lend him money in Dublin, the sort of expression that Best slhould have used.

Still Joyce believed, as he said in his early essay on- Mangan, that the artist should take into the center of his intenise life the life that surrounds it; hie could then fling it abroad again "amid planetary music." Stephen's theory of the artist in the Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, that he is "like the God of the crea- tion," remaining "within or behind or beyond or above his handi- work, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails," is perhaps a reflection of the Nietzschean phase during which Joyce facetiously described himself as "James Over- man," only to be outdone by Mulligan who calls Stephen, "Tooth- less Kinch the superman." It is much more aloof than Steplhen's theory in Ulysses; there he fabricates a hiistory of Slhakespeare's psychological development chiefly from the evidence furnished by the plays and the poems. Even in the Portrait Stephen's con- tention lha(d beein somewhat qualified by Lynch's sardonic com- ment, "Trying to refine them [tlhe fingernails] also out of exist- ence," to whiclh Stephen makes no reply. But in Ulysses Steplhlen determines from the evidence of Venus anid Adoniis that Shakes- peare was seduced by Anne Hathaway; from the gloomy Richard III an(l King Lear that An-ne betrayed her husbanid witlh hier two brotlhers-in-law Richard an(d Edmund, wlhose names Slhakes- peare accordingly attributed to his villains, and from the late plays that the birth of a granddaughter lha(d reconcile(l Shakes- peare to his lot.

This theory, whiclh according to friends Joyce took as seriously

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as Stephen, suggests that we should look in Ulysses for more than an impersonal and detached picture of Dublin life; it hints at what is, in fact, true, that nothing has been admitted into the book which is not in some way personal and attached. Like Shem in Finnegans Wake, Joyce "wrote over every square inch of the only foolscap available, his own body, till by its corrosive sub- limation one continuous present tense integument slowly un- folded all . . . history (thereby, he said, reflecting from his own individual person life unlivable, . .. common to all flesh, human only, mortal)." Instead of being creation's God, the artist is its squid, his work a secretion.

The daughters of memory, whom William Blake chased from his door, received from Joyce regular employment, although he speaks of them disrespectfully. His work is "history fabled," not only in the Portrait but in Ulysses and his other writings as well. He was never a creator ex nihilo; he put togetlher what he remembered, and lhe remembered most of what he had seen or hiad heard other people remember. The latter category was, in a city given over to anecdote, a large one. His art, as the following pages attempt to demonstrate, was a continual transposition and re-composition of known materials. For example, the scene in the physics classroom described in the Portrait telescopes two lectures, one on electricity and one on mechanics, which took place monthls apart. Moynihan's whispered remark, inspired by the lecturer's discussion of ellipsoidal balls, "Chase me, ladies, I'm in the cavalry!" was in fact made by a young man whose name was not Moynihan but Kinahan. In the same way, as Mr. J. F. Byrne informs us in his interesting memoir, the long scene with the director of studies in the Portrait and Stephen Hero happened not to Joyce but to him; he told Joyce of it seven years after the event, and was later displeased to discover how his innocent description of the dean of studies lighting a fire had been con- verte(l into a reflection of Stephen's strained relations with the Catholic Church.

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The stylization of Joyce's youth in Stephcn Hcro and the Portrait proceeds chiefly in three ways. Some changes are artis- tically almost gratuitous, but Joyce feels compelled to make them to spare his own feelings or those of his family. Just as he had turned his father into his uncle in the first two stories of Dubliners, he made the death of his brother George in 1902 into the death of a sister whom he called Isabel. The painfulness of exactly re- counting the death of George, of whom he was very fond, was relieved by the change of person.

But the main ways of stylizing his early life were by darken- ing and intensifying his youthful struggle with the Church, and by deepening his isolation from others. Stanislaus Joyce points out that his brother would sometimes counsel him to go easy with his rebellion against the church so as not to stir up a fuss; this moderation is not at all what we would expect from the pas- sionate Stephen. It is likely that Joyce passed more quickly from religious revolt to indifference than he has allowed Stephen to do.

The isolation of Stephen from his classmates is a steady process. A good example is his conversation in Stephen Hero with MacCann. MacCann is a rabid feminist, and Stephen, we are told, "delighted to riddle MacCann's theories with agile bullets." And so we have this dialogue:

-You would have no sphere of life closed to them [women]? -Certainly not.

Would you have the soldiery, the police, and the fire brigade recruited also from them?

-There are certain social duties for which women are physically unfitted.

MacCann's theory is certainly riddled, but it must be said that this conversation could not really have taken place in this form. The original of MacCann, a man named Francis Skeffington (later Sheehy-Skeffington), was an extremely clever debater, known for his skill in extricating himself from tight verbal

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situations. He had strong views about pacifism as well as women's rights, and would inevitably have answered Joyce, as he did others, that there should be no soldiery or police force. But Joycc wishes to present Stephen as forever triumphant in argument, and to sequester him from the tawdry world of his fellows. This sort of self-idealization pervades the Portrait too; it combats the view which, spurred by some remarks of Joyce, has lately become current, that he was unsympathetic and steadily ironic in his attitude to Stephen. Most of the alterations in the facts are 'in his own favor.

While the official date for the beginning of Ulysses is 1914, Joyce told George Borach in Zurich that he had been preoccupied with the Odyssey from the age of twelve. It was then that he first read Charles Lamb's Tales of Ulysses at Belvedere College. The use of mythical material as a background or parallel must have been in his mind from the time when, in the summer of 1904, he signed three stories with the name "Stephen Daeda- lus." Conscious of how the adoption of this name and its implied character would stylize the hero of his autobiographical novel, he must have quickly begun to feel his way towards another mythological figure to complement Stephen. By the autumn of I906 he writes his brother Stanislaus about a new story in his head, to be entitled "Ulysses." The story was never written; on February 6, 1907, he tells Stanislaus that " 'Ulysses' never got any forrarder than the title." From the evidence of Joyce's diary which Gorman prints, it is likely that the story was intended to include some of the material later incorporated in the Aeolus episode. Its abandonment was due, perhaps, to his discovery that he had material for a novel. As he toldt Borach (in J. T. Prescott's translation), "In Rome, when I had finislhed about half of the Portrait, I realized that the Odyssey hiad to be the sequel, and I began to write Ulysses." The way that the books led into each other is suggested by some discarded pages of the Portrait, which overlap the material of Ulysses, but are written in the discursive

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style appropriate to the earlier work. Joyce evidently read Homer carefully between 1907 and 1914,

and renewed his old enthusiasm. The Odyssey, he said to Borach, is "the most beautiful, all-embracing theme. It is greater, more hiuman than that of Hamlet, Don Quixote, Dante, Faust. Conscious of the fact that he was at the heiglht of his creative powers, he rcmarked, "Now niel mezzo del camn imm I find the subject of Odysseus the most human in world literature. Odysseus didn't want to go off to Troy; hie knew that the official reason for the war, the dissemination of the culture of Hellas, was only a pretext for the Greek merchants, who were seeking new mar- kets. When the recruiting officers arrived, he happened to be plowing. He pretended to be mad. Thereupon they placed his little two-year-old son in thle furrow. In front of the child he halts hiis plow. Observe the beauty of the motifs: the only man in HIellas wlho is agaiinst the war, and the father." Already he had found two themes of grcat importance in his own work, anti- iimilitarism an(1 family love. He was also very pleased to find in the researclhcs of Clrisitiani B6rar(d on the hiistoricity of the Odyssey that B'rard confirmedt lhis ownI guess, wlicih was that Homer was in his descriptions a naturalistic rathier thani fanciful writer, that Scylla and Charyb(is, (irce's isle, and all the other ports and OL)stacles encountered by Ulysses were real places. His classical parallel became so inevitable to him, the more he studied his material, tlhat, instea(l of his being a new Homer, Homer became almost a prefiguration of Jovce.

Since the action of Ulysses is depictedl as having taken l)lace fifty years ago, on June i6, 1904, some have assumed that Joyce virtually excluded from his mind all that he saw after leaving Dublin in the autumn of 1904. While the assumption does credit to the book's verisimilitude, it is an error. Ulysses includles a great deal that he came upon later. For example, the discussion in the library office is based mainly upon a lecture on Hamlet which Joyce gave in Trieste in 1913. There is mention in this episodie

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of Freud's "Viennese school," of which in 1904 no one in Dublin had heard, and of Karl Bleibtreu's theory that Rutland wrote Shakespeare's plays, of which Joyce first heard in Zurich during the first World War. He was evidently so struck by the name of Bleibtreu (whom he met) that he gives "Bliebtreustrasse'' as a Berlin address on a handbill picked up by Bloom.

In Dublin Joyce had known nothing of Vico, but in Trieste he read both Vico and Croce on Vico. So Croce's re-statement, "Man creates the human world, creates it by transforming him- self into the facts of society: by thinking it he re-creates his own creations, traverses over again the paths he has already traversed, reconstructs the whole ideally, and thus knows it with full and true knowledge," is echoed in Stephen's remark in Ulysses: "What went forth to the ends of the world to traverse not itself. God, the sun, Shakespeare, a commercial traveller, having itself traversed in reality itself, becomes that self. . . . Self which it itself was ineluctably preconditioned to become. Ecco!" Nor can it be assumed that Stephen's knowledge of Thomas Aquinas, whose work he paraphrases in the Proteus episode, derived from the anthiology of Aquinas which Joyce had picked up on the Dublin quays; Joyce studied him intensively in I913, just as, in I919, he spent several months in "working up" embryology for the Oxen of the Sun episode.

Not only the intellectual structure of Ulysses is affected by his later knowledge. The clutter of everyday life is often ana- chronistic, sometimes deliberately so. In 1904 John MacCormack was only slightly known, but Joyce pays his old friend the courtesy of making him already famous. He became acquainted with J. B. Pinker, the literary agent, in I9I5, when Pinker was very helpful to him, and he acknowledges his services by men- tioning his name. Joyce would hardly have included Alessandro Volta's name in his book if he had not attempted, in I9o9, to found the Volta Theatre in Dublin. When he dated George Moore's public conversion from Catholicism to Protestantism

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in 1904, Joyce probably knew, and did not care, that he was pre- dating the event by five years. On the other hand, he is probably unintentionally a little inaccurate in putting a skating rink into Dublin in 1904, for the first one was started in I906. But if he had known the precise date, he would probably have done it anyway. An amusing use of later information is Bloom's advo- cacy of the Poulaphouca reservoir scheme, which, as Joyce knew, was later adopted, and his prediction that Nannetti would be Lord Mayor of Dublin before long, as indeed he became in I9o6.

For the main body of his work Joyce of course relied chiefly upoll the incidents and conversations that he caught up from his first twenty years, spent almost continuously in Dublin, and from three later visits, two in I909 and one in 1912. Certain comic material was ready at hand, and, in thinking back upon his native city, he prepared his great convocation of the city's ec- centrics. There was Professor Maginni, the dark, middle-aged dancing-master of North Great George's Street. Everyone knew hiis costume of tailcoat and dark grey trousers, silk hat, an im- maculate higlh collar with wings; a gardenia in his buttonhole, spats, and a silver-mounted, silk umbrella in his hand; and his mincing step was familiar all over Dublin. There were also Mrs. McGinness the pawnbroker, who walked like a queen, and the five Hely's sandwichmen, each bearing a letter of the name; there was "Endymion" Farrell, who carried two swords, a fisi- ing rod, and an umbrella, wore a red rose in his buttonhole, and hiad upon his head a great bowler hat with large holes for venti- lation; from a brewer's family in Dundalk, it was said that lhe had fallen into a vat and never recovered. Then there was the one-legged beggar known as "The Blackbird" who used to sing and to curse undLer his breatlh if he got nothing for it. Finally, there was Michael Cusack, the founder of the Gaelic Atlhletic As';ociation, wlho wouldl come into a pub and pound witlh his lheavy blackthlorn on the counter, shouting at the waiter, "I'm Citizen Cusack from the Baroniy of Byrne in the County of Clare,

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you Protestant dog!" Where the other characters were introduced chiefly to salt the scene, Joyce saved Citizen Cusack for the important role of the Cyclops.

Less known than these, but familiar to Joyce or his family, was a cluster of other characters. He rewarded Father John Con- mee for his kindness to him at Clongowes Wood College, where Conmee was rector, by a benevolent portrait of the old man in the Wandering Rocks episode. A more questionable crony, "Lord" John Corley, who asks Stephen for money, was a police- man's son whom Joyce had already made use of in "Two Gal- lants." Ironically, Corley was delighted, as Stanislaus Joyce affirms, to hear that Joyce had used him in his books. When Molly Bloom objects to the singing of Kathleen Kearney, the name is not drawn from nowhere, but is a modification of that of Olive Kennedy, who appeared on a concert program with Joyce in 1902

and was the singer in his story, "A Mother." Other names brought up by Molly had a similar basis in fact; Tom Devan's two sons were friends of the Joyces, and Connie Connolly was the sister of Albrecht and Vincent Connolly, who together form much of the character called "Heron" in the Portrait. Even the dog Garry- owen is not made up of stray barks and bites, but belonged to a great grandfather of Joyce on his mother's side, whom Gerty MacDowell accurately identifies as "Grandpapa Giltrap." To find some of his characters Joyce went among the dead, the best example being Pisser Duff, whose name he delicately altered to Pisser Burke. Duff looked harmless, but was a very violent man who hung around the markets, brushing down horses while their owners drank at pubs. He was beaten to death by the police in Gardiner Street about I892, but Joyce evoked him to be a friend of the equally vicious narrator of the Cyclops episode.

Joyce built his art upon a rock, and the rock was reality, which he understood with deliberate naivete as a collocation of what Blake called "minute particulars." Both Stephen and Bloom profited from the magpie quality of their progenitor. The experi-

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ences of Joyce on this June day have been telescoped. He and Gogarty had taken the Martello tower at Sandycove, and he had a position at the Clifton School in Dalkey. In order to make June i6 a climactic day in Stephen's experience, Joyce has him quitting both the tower and the school on that day. In reality, like lesser men, hie finished out the school term, which continued until later in June. The other details of the first episode are equally compoundcd of fact and fiction. Gogarty had invited an Anglo-Irislhman, born in England, named Samuel Chenevix Trenchi, to stay at the tower with him and Joyce, an(l Joyce foun(d Trench repulsive, not least because of his recurrent nightmare about a black pantlher. One night Gogarty added to Joyce's irri- tation and friglht by seconding Haines's cries with shots from his own gun directed at the pans hanging above Joyce's head. Joyce, says Gogarty, got up and dressed ancl never returned. The black lanther duly makes his appearance, but the deliberate changes are more impressive. To suit his artistic needs Joyce converts Trenclh into "Haines," a pure-blooded Englishman, whose folk- lorist interest in Ireland then seems even more patronizing, an(d who can stanid for the conqueror as Mulligan is made to stand for Ireland's gay betrayer. To emphasize the contrast between Steplhen and Mulligan, Joyce makes Stephen a hydroplhobe, when in fact he himself swam often and greatly enjoyed the forty-foot bathing place by the tower. And to accentuate Steplhen's senise of guilt hie gives him the bitter memory of having refused to pray for his mother altlhough it was her (leath-bed wish, wlhen in life Joyce hiad refused not his mother, but his overbearing uncle.'

Joyce's resemblances to Bloom are more surprising. When he was six years old, he was sent away from his Bray home to begin sclhool at Clongowes. At Bray hiis best friend was Eileen

1. Jovcc's accuracy is usually so comlpletc that two variations in the cpisode may be nmentionedi; (nc is that the rcntal of the tower, paidl to the secrctary of state for war, was nine rather than twel%c poun(ls; the other that Bray Head cannot be seenl from the Martcllo tower.

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Vance, whom, as he asserts with historical accuracy in the Por- trait, everyone thought he would marry. Eileen's father sent the young Joyce a valentine purporting to come from her, which read,

O Jimmie Joyce you are my darling You are my looking-glass from night till morning I'd rather have you without one farthing Than Harry Newall and his ass and garden.

Harry Newall was an old cripple who drove around Bray with donkey and cart and begged; when a child was naughty, he was told, "If you don't behave, I'll give you away to Harry Newall." Joyce took out this crude irony and put the valentine into Ulysses, where Bloom remembers having sent it to his daughter Milly:

0, Milly Bloom, you are my darling. You are my looking glass from night to morning. I'd rather have you without a farthing Than Katey Keogh with her ass and garden.

These resemblances extend to names mentioned casually. The Joyce family employed for a time a charwoman, Mrs. Flem- ing; in Ulysses she works in a similar capacity for the Blooms. The name of the Joyces' midwife was Mrs. Thornton, who de- livered Joyce himself; it is she who is credited with having delivered both the Blooms' children. Joyce was born at Brighton Square, and the Blooms lived there shortly after their marriage. While at Belvedere Joyce took part in a dramatized version of Anstey's Vice Versa, a play which may have put the father-son theme in his head; Bloom also claims to have acted in this when a boy, although not in the same role. Both Joyce and Bloom took out books from the Capel Street Library, and both of them wrote themes, while at school, on the subjects of "My Favorite Hero" and "Procrastination Is the Thief of Time." They shared an admiration for the poetry of Byron, and Bloom gave Molly a copy of his works when he was courting her.

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Such personal associations do not stop with Joyce. Over the whole of Ulysses broods the mocking spirit of his father. John Stanislaus Joycc, or Jack Joyce as he was called, had an extra- ordinary skill as singer and as raconteur, and both his songs and his stories appear in Ulysses. He was always very proud of his eldest soIn, but never gratified him by commenting on any of his books; he did, hlowever, remark to a daughter, after receiving Ulysses, "He's a nicc sort of blackguard!" But as Joyce told Louis Gillet when his father dicd in 193I, "He never said anything about my books, but he could not deny me. The humor of Ulysses is lis; its people are lis friends; the book is his spitting image."

Superficially Jack Joyce is treated sharply as Simon Dedalus. Stephen continually denies that Simon is in any real sense his father, although Joyce himself hiad no doubt that he was in every way his father's son. Jack Joyce's intolerance of his wife's family receives considerable emphasis; he did, in fact, regularly use John and William Murray, his two brothers-in-law, as targets of satire. William had been indiscreet enough on one occasion to call his daughter, "Papa's little lump of love," and Jack Joyce wickedly re-phrases this as "papa's little lump of dung." He also delights in parodying his brother-in-law's insistence that his children call him "sir." William Murray appears in Ulysses as Richie Goulding, costdrawer for Goff and Tandy, that is, billing clerk for the well- known solicitors' firm of Collis and Ward.

The power of spccch of the narrator of the Cyclops episode also derives in part from Jack Joyce, who was, like the narrator, a "collector of bad and doubtful debts" during the time that he served as a rate collector; as such, he had the same knowledge of the private lives of everyone in Dublin which the narrator displays. The episode is full of Jack Joyce's expressions, as when, in the end, Bloom's apotheosis takes place "like a shot off a shovel." But Jack Joyce was a much kinder man.

Several of his favorite stories appear prominently in his son's

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writings. Two of them are toldl and re-told in Finniegans Wake, although, as James Joyce remarked, he was never certain that he had told them as well as his father used to. One dealt with a tailor who made a suit of clotlhes for a hunchbacked Norwegian captain; the captain was entirely dissatisfied and accused the tailor of mis- shaping the suit, while the tailor witlh equal vociferousness de- nounced the misshapen back of the captain as impossible to fit. Though the subject seems an unlikely one, the exchanges became very bitter and very witty. The second story had to do with Buck- ley and the Russian general during the Crimean War. Buckley, an Irishman fighting with the Britislh, had drawn a bead on a Russian general; the latter, all unaware of his danger, let down his trousers to defecate. The sight of his enemy in so helpless, human, and extranational a plight was too much for Buckley, who could not bring himself to shoot.

On one occasion in the Joyce household, as Judge Eugene Sheehy recalls in his (deliglhtful autobiography, Jack Joyce read from the Freeman's Journal the obituary notice of a dear friend, Mrs. Cassidy. Mrs. Joyce was shocked and cried out, "Oh! Don't tell me that Mrs. Cassidy is dead." "Well, I (lon't quite know about that," replied Jack Joyce, "but someone has taken the liberty of burying her." In the Cyclops episode, when Paddy Dignam's death is mentioned, Alf Bergan exclaims, " 'Dead! He is no more dead than you are.' 'Maybe so,' says Joe. 'They took the liberty of burying him this morning anyhow.'"

Another Jack Joyce anecdote is used to good advantage in the Eumaeus episode. He would tell how, when he was a rate collector, he was obliged to attend the levees in Dublin Castle. On one occasion there was a masquerade ball, and for a lark he went dressed as a British officer. The jarvey who drove hiim in a cab to the castle was expecting a tip befitting his passenger's rank, but Jack Joyce gave him the minimum. "Holy Jaysus," said the jarvey, "and I thought I lhad a real officer!" "And so you have, my man," said Jack Joyce, refusing to be intimidated. "I have,"

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said the jarvey, looking at the coin in his fist, "a cotton-ball one." In the cabman's shelter in Ulysses someone says of Kitty O'Shea, Parnell's mistress, "'Her husband was a captain or an officer.' 'Ay,' Skin-the-Goat amusingly added. 'He was, and a cotton- ball one.'"

The narrative thread of Ulysses winds in and out among the Joyce circle. Of Jack Joyce's friends who are prominent there, the most important were perhaps Matthew Kane and Ned Thorn- ton. Kane appears, as his initials suggest, as Martin Cunningham, although Joyce covers his tracks a little by naming Kane himself as dead. Thornton, a tea-taster, lived opposite the Joyces on North Richmond Street during the I890's; he was the father of Eveline for whom the story in Dubliners is named, and he is also the hero of "Grace," although the fall in the bar there occurred not to Thornton but to Jack Joyce. Thornton's brother, whom Joyce met only once, was the principal model for the character (as Jack Joyce was for the eloquence) of the Cyclops narrator.

Thornton's fictional name, Kernan, is probably derived from that of another of the Joyce's neighbors on North Richmond Street, McKernan. McKernan's daughter, Susie, was lame, and she becomes Gerty MacDowell in the Nausicaa episode, the name MacDowell being chosen not only because of its resemblance to McKernan, but because a family of that name lived on the North Strand near the Star of the Sea Church. In Ulysses one of Gerty's friends is Cissy Caffrey, and the name of Cissy came from another Richmond Street girl, Cissy Loane. A second friend of Gerty is Edy Boardman, who represents a curious combination of two neighbor children, Eily and Eddie Boardman. When Gerty Mac- Dowell is said to be jealous because of Edy Boardman's vanity over "the boy that had the bicycle always riding up and down in front of her window," Joyce is recollecting that Eddie Board- man was famous through all Drumcondra because he had the first pneumatic-tired bicycle in the neighborhood; boys came from everywhere to see it. But when he has Gerty say of the boy

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on the bicycle, "Only now his father kept him in the evening studying hard to get an exhibition in the intermediate that was on and he was going to Trinity College to study for a doc- tor ... .," he has his own assiduity, famous on North Richmond Street, in mind, as well as his brief passage as a medical student in 1902. Joyce honored North Richmond Street above any other Dublin thoroughfare by combing it house by house for material.

By weighting his work with innumerable specific details, he won his freedom to re-compose them as he liked. The stubborn- ness with which he refuses to invent at first seems startling. Where, for example, does he get the advertisement, "What is home without Plumtree's Potted Meat? Incomplete"? It is an improved version of a familiar slogan, "Life without Beacham's [Liver] Pills Is Mere Existence."' Where does he obtain the name of Mrs. Purefoy, the lady whose labor pains end in the Oxen of the Sun episode with the birth of a boy? The name comes, appropriately enough, from Dr. R. Damon Purefoy, who in 1904 was Dublin's leading obstetrician; he was noted for the

2. Among many instances of the use of popular lore may be mentioned two songs which pass through Bloom's mind. The first ran:

"Oh, oh, Antonio, He's gone away, Left me on my ownio; I'd like to meet him With his new sweetheart When up would go Antonio And his ice cream cart."

It was taken up in a second song:

"Has anybody here seen Kelly? Kay ee double ell wy? Has anybody here seen Kelly? Find him if you can. He's as bad as old Antonio, Left me on my ownio, Has anybody here seen Kelly? Kelly from the Isle of Man?"

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speed with which his smart car, its fast-trotting horse harnessed American-fashion, could go through the crowded streets. Or where does Joyce find those remarkable letters from H. Rum- bold, barber, quoted in the Cyclops episode, in which Rumbold advertises his skill as a lhangman? Here the answer is more in- volved. Jack Joyce's friend, Alf Bergan, was at one time assistant to the sub-sheriff of Dublin, Long John Clancy, whose name is thinly disguised in Ulysses as Long John Fanning. Hangings were rare in Dublin, and Clancy had no taste for the job of hiring a hangman. So hie called in Bergan and announced he was going to London, and would leave all the preparations in Bergan's reluctant handls. Bergan, who delighted to retell the story in later years, received letters from an English barber named Billington, offering to do the job on his way back from a holiday in Ireland. Joyce remembered the gist of the letters and used it, but he changed the barber's name to H. Rumbold after Sir Horace Rumbold, British Minister in Bern in I9I8, against whom he had a grievance. Two other British diplomatic employees by whom he was incensed in Zurich, A. Percy Bennett, the consul-general there, and a man named Henry Carr, are immortalized at the end of the Circe episode: Carr's name is given to one of the two soldiers who beat up Stephen, and Private Carr discusses his superior officer, Bennett, in the most disrespectful way.

Fact then, rather than fancy, liberated Joyce's art. He forged new creatures out of old ones. In "The Dead," for example, Gabriel Conroy is a mixture of Constantine Curran, from whom Joyce borrows the complexion, and sometling of the manner, of Jack Joyce, who used to carve the meat and make the speech at the annual affairs given by Joyce's great-aunts at I5 Usher's Is- land; and of Joyce himself, who wrote reviews for the Daily Express, a unionist newspaper, and disparaged Ireland in favor of the continent. Miss Ivors, who reproves his lack of national feeling, is based partly, in her dress and convictions, on Kath-

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leen Sheehy, whose character was however quite different. Both Curran and Joyce married women from the west of Ireland; but it was Nora Barnacle Joyce who remembered "The Lass of Augh- rim" and connected it with her Galway sweetheart, "Sonny" Bodkin (whose real name, Michael Bodkin, Joyce deftly changed to Michael Furey). When Joyce came to Galway in 1912, one of his first questions was about the words of this song, which he afterwards frequently sang.3

It might be supposed that Gabriel Conroy was, in its com- bination of a religious and an Irish name, a clever duplication of Constantine Curran; it is this, but Joyce is more naturalistic still; it was also the name of a publican on Howth. So he wove and unwove his personages and plots in all his works, even in Fin- negans Wake, where Shem and Shawn are partly James and his brother John Stanislaus Joyce, and partly otlier sets of counter- parts whom Joyce knew in life or literature; but they are also the names of two feeble-minded North Strand hangers-on, James and John Ford, famous for their incomprehensible speech and their shuffling gait, whose only occupations were bringing the hurley sticks on to the field for the hurley teams, and carrying two of Hely's sandwich-signs. The factual foundation is many layers thick.

3. Three verses of "The Lass of Aughrim" were approximately as follows:

"If you be the lass of Aughrim As I am taking you mean to be Tell me the first token That passed between you and me.

O don't you remember That night on yon lean hill When we both met together Which I am sorry now to tell.

The rain falls on my yellow locks And the dew it wets my skin, My baby lies cold in my arms, Lord Gregory, let me in...."

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II. The Uses of Parody and Imitation

At the heart of Joyce's genius lies a talent for imitation and for parody. One of the best examples is his transmutation of a letter from Henry Blackwood Price to William Field, M.P., into the letter which Mr. Deasey asks Stephen to try to get published for him in the Dublin newspapers. Price wrote from Austria:

Dear Sir- I have this morning received from my friend, Professor Joyce, a letter in which he gives me your address. I therefore lose no time in giving you all the particulars with which I am acquainted, as to the treatment of foot-and-mouth disease in this Province of Austria. I must premise that I am an Irishman without politics, except a sincere desire to serve my country with any means in my power, and as far as I can in a practical manner. Many years ago I was in County Meath when there was a severe outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease. Then, as now, all affected beasts were destroyed. I was surprised last autumn to learn that a case of this disease was cured in eight or nine days, not half a mile from my house. When therefore I learned that the outbreaks in the British Isles had assumed so vast a proportion I determined to do the best I could to bring the method of cure, adopted in Styria, to the knowledge of my country- men. I will not waste time in enumerating all the railway journeys I have taken, or the letters I have written on the subject, but will as briefly as is consistent with clearness, put you in possession of all I know with reference to the method of treatment here. The methods adopted in Austria are by a serum of inoculation, which is brought here from Berlin. There are varying opinions among the Veterinary Authorities here as to the efficacy of this remedy. In any case it deserves a trial in Ireland. The case in the Alpine village where I live was treated, I believe, exclusively with Pyok- tanin as a disinfectant followed by tannic acid. I sent on the gth inst. a registered letter to the County Veterinary Surgeon for the County Down (where I was born) giving him full particulars. . . . I did the same to Mr. Runciman, Minister of Agriculture, on the 7th instant. ... On the ioth instant I wrote to the Department of Agriculture in Dublin at their request, in answer to an offer on my part to give them information as to the Styrian mode of treatment of foot-and-mouth disease. Sufficient time has not yet elapsed to allow of my having any reply or acknowledg- ment. ..

RICHARD ELLMANN 355

I hope you will not regard me as an enthusiast who imagines that he has found a specific for this disease. I do not go so far as that, but I say that in the hands of expericnced veterinary surgeons Pyoktanin is, in an enormous percentage of cases, absolutely successful and, therefore, saves a great deal of money to the cattle owners. . . . There are two points in this question which should not be lost sight of. First, the cure may be quite successful in the case of the Murzthaler or the Murthaler breeds, the two breeds which are here best known, and yet with shorthorns and higher bred cattle less successful. Anyway, it should have a trial in Ireland.... Second, a great deal depends upon expcrienced veterinary treatment. I am in almost daily communication with three gentlemen who have had great success. . . . They are all three quite ready to go to the British isles with- out pay. . . . Herr E. Boehine . . . is now looking after some cases of foot-and-mouth disease near the Emperor's shooting lodge at Murzsteg....

I have absolutely no interest of a personal nature in this matter. My friend, Mr. Jas. Joyce, will tell you I am not that sort.

-I am, sir, yours faithfully, Henry N. Blackwood Price, M.I.E.E.

Joyce's remarkable re-creation of this letter comes in the Nestor episode:

-I have put the matter in a nutshell, Mr. Deasy said. It's about the foot and mouth disease....

May I trespass on your valuable space. That doctrine of laissez faire which so often in our history. Our cattle trade. The way of all our old industries. Liverpool ring which jockeyed the Galway harbour scheme. European conflagration. Grain supplies through the narrow waters of the channel. The pluterperfect imperturbability of the department of agri- culture. Pardoned a classical allusion. Cassandra. By a woman who was no better than she should be. To come to the point at issue. -I don't mince words, do I? Mr. Deasy asked as Stephen read on. Foot and mouth disease. Knock as Koch's preparation. Serum and virus. Per- centage of salted horses. Rinderpest. Emperor's horses at Miirzsteg, lower Austria. Veterinary surgeons. Mr. Henry Blackwood Price. Courteous offer a fair trial. Dictates of comnion sense. All important question. In every sense of the word take the bull by the horns. Thanking you for the hos- pitality of your columns.

356 ULYSSES

I want that to be printed antd read, Mr. Deasy said. You wvill see at the next outbreak they will put an embargo oni Irish cattle. And it canl 1be cured. It is cured. My cousin, B3lackwood Price, writes to me it is regularly treated and cured in Austria by cattle doctors there. Thcy offcr to comiie over here. I am trying to work up influence with the department. Now I'm going to try publicity. I'm surrounided by difficulties, by . . intrigucs,

by . . backstairs influence, by . . . -I wrote last night to Mr. Ficld, M.P.

The real Mr. Deasy was Francis Irwin, wlho lhad the Clifton School at Dalkey. This school was closed at the end of the tcrm in 1904, because the owner of the buildings andl grounds was unwilling to put up with Irwin's clhronic drunkenniess. Joycc hias entirely suppressed this aspect of Irwin's charactcr; he lhas turnied him from an alcoholic into a Polonius. Deasy's references to Helen of Troy as "a woman no better than she shoultd be," is later ma(le to seem singularly appropriate to a man wlhose wife has left him a "grass widower"; but the real Irwin was a bachelor who lived with an elderly sister. Joyce altere(d the facts in or(ler to add a humorous example to the theme of a(dtiltery which per- vades Ulysses (Shakespeare, Menelaus, Captain O'Shea, and Bloom), so that Deasy's letter is entirely apposite.

This device, which might be called the multiplication of instances, is essential to Joyce's method; hie hiabitually works with parallels, some of them parodic, some not. The recently published notes to Exiles indicate the process; because that plav and Ulysses were both to employ the theme of cuckoldry, Joyce had been reading and meditating on all the famous cuckoldis of history an(d literature. "The character of O'Shea," he notes late in 1913 or early in 19I4, "is much more typical of Ireland" than that of his wife, who committed adultery with Parnell. "The two greatest Irishmen of modern times-Swift and Parnell-broke their lives over women. And it was the adulterous wife of the King of Lein- ster who brought the first Saxon to the Irish coast." Or, as Mr. Deasy puts it to Stephen, "A faithless wife first brought the

RICHARD ELLMANN 357

strangers to our shore here, MacMurrough's wife and her leman O'Rourke, prince of Breffni. A woman too brought Parnell low." Joyce also mentions Moliere's Le Cocu Imaginaire and Georges Dandin, the unpublished drafts of Flaubert's Madame Bovary, and Paul de Kock's Le Cocu. He contrasts L,e Cocu with Moliere's plays, as being painful and hesitating instead of salacious, humor- ous, indecent, and lively. Exiles and Ulysses embody both possible approaches to the subject, the later work almost a parody of the first.

The parodic element is often directed at himself in Ulysses. For example, the vision of the girl at the seashore, which comes at the end of the fourth chapter of Ulysses, is there described with the stages of spiritual tumescence and detumescence carefully delineated. This strange encounter, which actually occurred in Joyce's life, is parodied in Ulysses in the Nausicaa episode, by Bloom's orgasmic but equally detached contemplation of Gerty Mac Dowell. In the same way, Joyce's talks with J. F. Byrne's rep- resented in the Portrait as Cranly, during which he boldly an- nounced his disaffection from Catholicism and his embracement of art, are parodied by Bloom's walks with Mastiansky and Citron in whiclh he boldly confides his agnosticism and his belief in Darwinism.

This self-mockery was usually subsequent to, rather than concurrent with, the original experience. The genuinely romantic strain in Joyce's mind led him to his lay vision of the girl at the seashore, as it helped to lead him to his heroic non serviam. It led him also to the poems of Chamber Music, but as usual he later cut into these mercilessly with the anecdote about chamber pots. The recent edition of these poems which finds their covert concern to be with micturition misunderstands the way that Joyce worked; his mind began with romance, even if it ended with controlled self-dlestruction. Joyce in 1904 formed the notion of touring the English watering places, singing and playing a lute, and wrote to Arnold Dolmetsch (who had designed a psaltery

358 ULYSSES

for Florence Farr), asking that he make him one. Dolmetsch's reply to this letter is alluded to directly in Ulysses wlhen Stephen asks, "Lynch, did I show you the letter about the lute?" But it is also parodied in Bloom's notion of a concert tour for Molly, "Tour the south then. What about English watering places? Brighton, Margate. Piers by moonliglht. Her voice floating out." This conception becomes even more grandiose when it is re-stated in the Eumaeus episode:

Another thing just struck him as a by no means bad notion was he might have a gaze around on the spot to see about tryinig to make arrange- ments about a concert tour of summincr miiusic embracing the inost prom- inent pleasure resorts, Margate with mixed bathitng and first rate hydros and spas, Eastbourne, Scarborough, Margate and so on, beautiful Bourne- mouth, the Channel islands anid sinilar bijou spots, which might prove highly remunerative. Not, of course, with a hole and corner scratch com- pany or local ladies on the job, witness Mrs. C. P. M'Coy type-lend me your valise aind I'll post you the ticket. No, somcthing top notch, an all star Irish cast, the Tweedy-Flower granid opera companiy with his own legal consort as leading lady as a sort of counter-blast to the Elster Grimes and Moody-Manners, perfectly simple matter and he was quite sanguine of success, providing puffs in the local papers could be managed by some fellow with a bit of bounce who could pull the indispensable wires and thus combine business with l)leasure. But who? That was the rub.

This technique, of swelling and ridiculing, is used systematically in three episodes, Cyclops, Nausicaa, and Oxen of the Sun; but it operates less conspicuously throughout the book. Like Shem in Finnegans Wake, Joyce is "for ever cracking quips on himself."

Parody is closely allied in hiis art with imitation. His talent for mimuicry was the a(lmiration, and the annoyance of his friends. He was muclh given, as Dr. Gogarty hias complained, to rushing off to the lavatory in the midst of a coniversation to write down some chance but revealing remark he had just heard. The talent extends to books as well as conversations; in Finnegans Wake he imitates and elaborates upon a paragraph from Edgar Quinet;

RICHARD ELLMANN 359

in "The Dead" the famous ending is imitated from the twelfth book of the Iliad. Homer had written (in Thoreau's transla- tion), "The snowflakes fall thick and fast on a winter's day. The winds are lulled, and the snow falls incessant, covering the tops of the mountains, and the hills, and the plains where the lotus- tree grows, an(l the cultivated fields, and they are falling by the inlets and shores of the foaming sea, but are silently dissolved by the waves." This becomes in "The Dead": ". . . Snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. ... He hieard the snow falling faintly through the universe. ..." Joyce has developed the Homeric figure, wlich in context uses snowflakes as a simile for arrows; he has localized it and subdued it to fit Gabriel Conroy's mood; and he has prepared for it throughout the story. It is an imitation which transcends the usual meaning of that word.

His imitation of reality extends painstakingly to insuring the accuracy of his details. Some curious letters from him to his aunt Josephine Murray have survived; in one he asks whether there are trees, and if so of what kind, behind the Star of the Sea Church. In another he asks hier to go to 7 Eccles Street to measure the distance from the sidewalk to the area to make sure that Bloom in his novel coul(d have managed that descent. Joyce had seen his friend Byrne, whose exact height and weight are those which he attributes to Bloom, negotiate the drop successfully; but since Byrne was more athletic than Bloom, he needed to be sure that the distance was not too great. An even more striking anecdote of Joyce's naturalism is that of Samuel Beckett. Beckett was taking dictation from Joyce for Fin negans Wake; there was a knock on the door and Joyce said, "Come in." Beckett, who hadn't heard the knock, by mistake wrote down "Come in" as part of the dictated text. Afterwards he read it back to Joyce who said, "What's that 'Come in' ?" "That's what you dictated," Beck-

360 ULYSSES

ett replied. Joyce thought for a moment, realizing that Beckett hadn't heard the knock; then he said, "Let it stand." The very fact that the misunderstanding had occurred in actuality gave it prestige for Joyce.

His naturalism in Ulysses has many intricate supports, and one of the most interesting is the blurred margin. Joyce intro- duces much material which he does not inten(d to explain, so that his book, like life, gives the impression of having many threads that we cannot follow. For example, on the way to the funeral, the morners catclh sight of Reuben J. Dodd, and Mr. Dedalus says, "The devil break the hasp of his back." This re- action seems a little excessive unless we know that Doddl lha(d lent money to Joyce's father, and that the subsequent exactions were the efficient cause of Mr. Dedalus' irritation. In the Circe episode Mulligan says, "Mulligan meets the afflicted mother," a remark based upon a story once current in Dublin that Gogarty, return- ing home late one night in his medical-stu(dent period, staggered up the steps of his home on Rutland Square, reciting a station of the Cross at each step until, as he reached the top of the stairs and his worried mother opene(d the (loor, he concluded, "Go- garty meets the afflicte(d motlher."

A similar mystery lies in Stephen's remark at the brotlhel, "Death is the highest form of life." Wlhile its extravagance fits so neatly into the Walpurgis-Nacht atmosphere as not to puzzle the reader particularly, the phrase comes from one of the elegant periods in Joyce's early lecture on Mangan. He said thlere, "As often as human fear and cruelty, that wicked monster begotten by luxury, are in league to make life ignoble and sullen and to speak evil of death the time is come wherein a man of timi(d courage seizes the keys of hell and of death, and flings tlhcm far out into the abyss, proclaiming the praise of life, which the abiding, splen- dour of truth may sanctify, and of deatlh, the most beautiful form of life." The Mangan lecture is not altogether clear, but Joyce was probably implying, whether on the basis of cynicism or faitlh,

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that death and life were only different modes of being, a propo- sition defensible in Catholic or Theosophical terms, but one which became the subject of much ridicule among his fellow-students.

Two of his remarks about Cranly are also incomprehensible solely in terms of Ulysses. "The Tinahely twelve" and "Cranly's eleven true Wicklowmen to free their sireland" refer to a remark Byrne had made to his friends Merriman and Clancy; they had agreed that twelve men with resolution and the courage to give their lives if necessary could save Ireland, and Byrne said that he thought he could find twelve such men in Wicklow. Joyce calls them "eleven" first because there are eleven players on a soccer team, and then refers to them as "the Tinahely twelve" because the railroad station where Byrne would leave the train on his visits to Wicklow was Tinahely. Again, Stephen says of Cranly early in the book, "He now will leave me. And the blame? As I am. All or not at all." These sentences refer to Byrne's griev- ance against Joyce for sending letters about sexual exploits in Paris to a man named Vincent Cosgrave; Byrne came near to breaking with Joyce on his return because of it, and found the explanations Joyce offered unsatisfactory. But Stephen says Cranly must accept him as he is, "all or not at all." With numerous truncated references of this sort Joyce edged his book; he is per- haps alone among naturalistic writers in his use of what in less discreet lhands might be a dangerous device.

In larger compass, the Aeolus or newspaper episode provides an excellent example of all Joyce's devices at work. He had con- siderable knowledge of the newspaper world. He could draw upon his recollections of Chillingworth's (here called Long- worth's) Daily Express, for whiclh in 1903 and 1904 he wrote reviews, and the Piccolo della Sera, of Trieste, of which his friend Roberto Prezioso was editor. His originality will be more ap- parent if it is understood at once that almost none of the episode comes from anything he remembered in I904, that almost all of it is the result of re-working earlier and later memories. The best

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source of material was a trip he made to Dublin in I909, Wlhich he skillfully wove into the earlier setting. He came to Dublin early in the month of August, with a commission from Prezioso to do some articles about Ireland for the Piccolo. At the time Dublin was in a furore because the Abbey Theatre threatened to stage Shaw's The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet in spite of the Lord Chancellor's ban on the play, on the grounds that his authority did not extend to Ireland. Yeats and Lady Gregory did in fact produce the play during Horse Slhow week, from Wednes- day, August 25, througlh Saturday, August 28. Joyce was very interested and went to the first night with the other reporters; afterwards he was introdluced to most ot them in a pub. Thlle next day he turned up at the offices of the Evening Telegraph, and Patrick J. Mead, the editor, lhospitably introduced him to other members of the staff.

The Evening Telegraph, closely associated with the Free- man's Journal, was one of Dublin's grand old papers, dating back to 1763. It was to survive a fire in I9I6 and to last until 1926. The offices which the two papers shared were also old, and very big and rambling; they extentlded from Prince's Street to Middle Abbey Street. The edito.-ial staff used the Abbey Street exit, and Joyce lhas the newspaper boys using the same one, when in fact the despatch room was on the Prince's Street side. This transposi- tion may have been inadvertent, but was more probably a deliber- ate decision to add to the Aeolian atmosphere of haste and con- fusion. The publisher of the Freeman's journal was Thomas Sex- ton, a Parnellite who was feuding with Archbishop Walsh; con- sequently his paper minimized whiatever the Archbislhop did and played up everything that Cardinal Logue did. Walsh evidently made frequent protests, which Joyce refers to without explanation in the sentence, "His grace phoned down twice this morning."

The evolution of the clharacter of Aeolus, god of the winds, blended memory and art. Joyce calls him Myles Crawford, and the name suggests that of the editor of the Evening Telegraph

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in 1904, Morris Cosgrave. But the personality of Crawford is not that of Cosgrave, but of Patrick J. Mead, who in 1904 was only sub-editor, though editor by I909. Pat Mead, like most of the staff in I909, was about fifty years old. A big, stout man, with red hair and a red face, he dressed like a dandy, and was invariably clean shaven with a flower in his buttonhole, although he had usually spent most of the previous night in his cups. He was a widower with a daughter and two sons. Mead had a terrible temper, but was basically very kind and probably an "easy touch"; on this occasion, however, the barrister O'Molloy fails to "raise the wind" with him. Following the pattern of life set by their editor, the other staff members were also great drinkers; drinking ca- pacity was said to be a primary consideration in hiring them.

Joyce paid close attention to what he saw in the Evening Telegraph offices. The cashier of the newspaper was a man named Ruttledge, who had a high, squeaky voice. On pay-day Ruttledge carried a money box around with him, paying out from office to office of the old building; and his coming was announced by the phrase, "The ghost walks," spoken in Ulysses by Professor Mac- Hugh. MacHugh himself was, as his name suggests, Hugh Mac- Neill, a brilliant scholar of the classical and modern languages, whose great promise was never fulfilled. Ordinarily careless in dress, he had for a time a position as teacher of romance lan- guages at Maynooth, and so was obliged to wear hat and tailcoat; he usually left them unbrushed. Gogarty, speculating upon this garb, evidently made the remark, "In mourning for Sallust," which passes through Stephen's mind. An idle rather than a dis- sipated man, MacNeill used to arrive early in the morning at the Evening Telegraph offices, read the paper, and remain all day. As the members of the staff arrived, he reprimanded them for being late. The title of professor was accorded him out of slightly ironic politeness, for in fact he never attained that eminence.

While the description and speech of Mead are generally those

364 U LYSSES

of Crawford, Joyce has inflated him somewhat as god of the winds of news. Mead was never guilty of either profanity or obscenity, but Joyce heightens his irascible temper with frequent oatlhs, and makes him say, "Kiss my royal Irishi arse." Mead never said this, but Joyce did not invent it either. It was said by Johni Wyse Power, who was famous at the Evening Telegraph offices for the expression.

Power himself appears in Ulysses under the name of Johin Wyse Nolan, an(d also undergoes a slight artistic revision. Joyce represents him in the Wandering Rocks episode as quoting "ele- gantly" from the Merchant of Venice, "I'll say there is mucl kindness in the Jew." The quotation was one he might well have made-he was a very well educated man who knew Greek, Latin, and German; but Power did not speak elegantly, was on the contrary rough in manner, with a rough, red beard and a big, inelegant voice. In his broadside of 19I2, "Gas from a Burner," Joyce spoke kindly of both Power and O'Leary Curtis, saying that he spouted Italian by the hour to them. O'Leary Curtis ap- pears in the Aeolus episode as O'Madden Burke. Tall and thin, he dressed to suit his melancholy temper, and was widely read, particularly in French literature. Among the other slightly modi- fied names is that of Ifnatius Gallaher, singled out by the editor for hiaving scooped the world's press on the Phoenix Park mur- ders in I882; thlis was Gnatius Giltrap, related, like Gran(dfathier Giltrap, to Joyce's mother. He is described at greater length in the story, "A Little Clou(l."

Several people appear under their own names. Joyce seems to have been guide(d in part by his attitude towardls them, in part by the possibilities of libel action, and in part by the artistic exigencies of his material, in determining wlhether or not to change their names. His uncle John Murray workecd on the ad- vertising staff of the Freeman's Journal and is mentioned here in that capacity; he was called "Red" Murray to distinguislh him from Chris Murray, also on the advertising staff, who was known

RICHARD ELLMANN 365

as "Black" Murray. Brayden, whose imposing entrance is observed by Red Murray and Bloom at the beginning of the episode, was at that time the editor of the Daily Telegraph. The description of him as bearded and with hunched shoulders is true to life. Paddy Hooper and Jack Hall were two reporters; Hooper, the son of an alderman mentione(d elsewhere in Ulysses, was to be the Evening Telegraph's last e(ditor. About I909 lhe was usually assigned to London; hence he is depicted here as having come over to Ireland only the night before. Hall was a famous reporter with old-world manners and tastes, wlho in I9OI highly praised Joyce's acting in his review of a play called Cupid's Confidante. Nannetti was foreman printer of the Freeman's Journal in 1904;

Joyce probably saw his son, who was foreman printer of the Evcning Telegraph in I909. Chris Callinan, whom Lenelhan mockingly calls Ignatius Gallaher's brother-in-law, was a reporter who hiad the Dublin coast as his province and was famous for his Irish bulls. These personages were not of much importance in the book, but they peopled Joyce's newspaper world and gave it lights and shadows.

One of Joyce's most curious composite portraits is Lenehan, the parasite who speaks French. The name is borrowed from Matt Lenehan, a reporter on the Irish Times, but the personality lhe took from a friendl of his father named Michael Hart, who was dead by about I900. Mick Hart, because of his habit of speak- ing French, was called Monsart (that is, Monsieur Hart). He worked, as Joyce implies, for a racing paper called Sport, and always attended the races in flashy attire. As in "Two Gallants," where he first makes his appearance in Joyce's work, he longed to marry a rich girl, and paid court for a time to the daughter of Joseph Nagle, one of three brothers who kept a big public house in Earl Street; but nothing came of it. He knew a great deal about racing and was fond of writing doggerel; his greatest (lay was that, still recalle(d by Dubliners, wlhen he "tipped the (louble" in verse; that is, hie predicted the winners of both the

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Lincolnshire Handicap and Grand National Steeplechase. Not long after this triumph he went downhill, and spent his

later days, in spite of his ability, in "knocking around on the hard." He continued to write verse; Joyce gives one of his less successful productions, a limerick, in this episode. Most of Hart's poems had to do with attempts to get money and credit; one was entitled, "On Looking for the Loan of a Tanner [sixpence]"; another, which may be recorded here, dealt with his effort to obtain a pint of stout at Darden's Public House:

One day I asked a pint on tick From Mr. Darden, who In lordly accents told me 'Twas a thing he didn't do.

In Fanning's I owed threepence, In Bergin's one and four, In McGuire's only sixpence For they wouldn't give me more.

When makes [sixpences] is gone and nothing's left To shove into the pawn, I ramble up to Stephen's Green And gaze on Ardilaun [a title held by the Guinness family,

who made porter].

Yet, as if to belie his incarnation in Ulysses, Joyce included Mich- ael Hart in a list of Bloom's friends who are now dead.

To weld the Aeolus episode together, Joyce used three speeches and an epiphany of his own. The first speech was by Charles Dawson, a baker who was lord mayor in I882, later became chief of the rates department, where Jack Joyce must have known him, and was also chairman of the Irish Forestry Society. He is called "Doughy Dan" here because of his profes- sion. To his fustian oratorical style, which he probably exagger- ates, Joyce counterposes a florid but noble passage from the speech of Seymour Bushe, Q.C., in the Childs murder case. It is im-

RICHARD ELLMANN 367

possible to know whether Bushe actually used the remarks at- tributed to him; they do not appear in his speech to the jury as reported in the press, although that has the same florid eloquence. If he did use the words, Joyce must have been in the audience, for, as a friend relates, he attended this murder case in October, i899, and followed the proceedings with great interest. It in- volved an alleged fratricide, a subject which continued to pre- occupy Joyce for the rest of his life, and in Ulysses is connected with Stephen's theory of Shakespeare's antagonism to his brothers. Even Bushe's rhetoric pales in comparison with the third speech in this episode, that by John F. Taylor, which Joyce may also have heard, and which was at any rate accessible to him in pamph- let form; he gives it verbatim. Against these three passages, all in varying shades of purple, he sets Stephen's grey one-a bitter, naturalistic account of two ordinary Irish women going up Nel- son's Pillar to take a look at a very real-and not very pleasant- Ireland. When asked what he calls this, Stephen answers, "A Pisgah Sight of Palestine," a name which was probably impressed on Joyce's mind by a question on Fuller's work on one of his intermediate examinations.

The episode plays its main themes against a faqade of trivial- ity: it has stock characters, like Red Murray and Brayden, of no consequence to the story, but useful to give the sense of a crowded newspaper office; it has a series of minor incidents, some, relating to Bloom and Stephen, serving to keep the narrative thread run- ning, others, like O'Molloy's effort to borrow from the editor, gratuitous except to solidify the moment with lifelike inconse- quence; it has a great deal of conversation, much of it with an arcane professionalism about it, such as the remark about his grace's phone calls, or the private joke about Chris Callinan, to blur the margin and sharpen the sense that a genuine "tranche de vie" is being presented. Against the conversational ground Joyce puts his four "set" pieces, the three flights of highflown and more or less noble rhetoric, and Stephen's cynical counter-

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blast in terse, naturalistic style. The effect of profusion and abundance is derived not only from the multitude of characters and incidents, but from the variety of methods used to set them forth.

Ill. Circe and the Meaning of Ulysses In the Circe episode, the climax of Ulysses, all the conscious

memories of the day in the minds of Bloom and Stephen, and even memories unknown to them, intersect, and the mental plane shifts abruptly from the conscious to the unconscious level. It offered Joyce a real test of his skill, and his success can be illumin- ated by an awareness of his raw materials. There was, to begin with, the necessity of finding an adequate setting. Following a long series of Homeric commentators who have moralized Circe's den as a place of temptation where the bestial aspects of men emerge, Joyce decided on the red-light district of Dublin for his scene. The word "Nighttown" was his invention, the usual Dub- lin word being "Monto," so called because Montgomery Street runs beside the brothel area. Monto was described authoritatively about I885 as the worst slum in Europe. It was concentrated chiefly in Mecklenburg Street, which became Tyrone Street and is now a dreary Railway Street, the name having been changed as part of an effort, vain until recently, to change its character. The street is made up of eighteenth-century houses; while some of these had by i9oo decayed into tenements, others, the "flash houses," were kept up beautifully by ladies who appeared in full evening dress before their select clientele.

Horse Show week in August was especially grand in Monto. The Britislh officers arrived in numbers for the event, and the Monto ladies sent their cards at once to the officers' mess. The ladies drove to the races in pony traps, and afterwards a proces- sion of innumerable cabs followed them back to Monto. The Boer War also proved a great boon to their business. In 1902 the Irish Battalion of Yeomanry returned from South Africa, and

RICHARD ELLMANN 369

a dull-witted society paper published an anonymous poem senti- mentally celebrating the heroes' return, in which however the first letter of each line formed the acrostic sentence, "The whores will be busy." This poem, which was quickly comprehended, killed the paper dead. It was usually attributed to Gogarty, then a medical student.

Joyce's knowledge of Monto was of course as complete as his knowledge of the Evening Telegraph. He does not have Bloom and Steplhen patronize the lower numbers of Mecklen- burg Street, near Mabbot Lane, since these were usually patron- ized by English "tommies"; these houses were full of religious pictures, behind which the ladies kept "coshes," pieces of lead pipe, to prevent trouble. Joyce asked one of his visitors in the 'thirties to secure a complete list of the names and addresses on Mecklenburg Street, and seems to have retained his interest in them. A lady appropriately named Mrs. Lawless lived at No. 4; her neighbour, at No. 5, was Mrs. Hayes, a grandmotherly type. But at the upper end of the street were the principal houses. Bloom, searching for Stephen at Mrs. Cohen's (No. 82), knocks first by mistake at No. 85, but is told that this is Mrs. Mack's house. Actually Mrs. Mack kept two houses, No. 85 and No. go, and was so well known that the whole area was sometimes called "Macktown."4

As for Mrs. Cohen, she was older than Mrs. Mack, and by 1904 had either died or retired, but Joyce restored her in busi- ness because her name suited the Jewish themes in the book. Her

4. The medical students had a bawdy song that began,

O there goes Mrs. Mack; She keeps a house of imprudence, She keeps an old back parlor For us poxy medical students, To show, to show That we are medical students, To show, to show That we medicals don't give a damn.

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girls were probably modelled on contemporary prostitutes. Florry Talbot, for instance, was probably Fleury Crawford.5 The descrip- tion of another girl, Kitty Ricketts, suggests Becky Cooper, probably the best known among Dublin prostitutes from the beginning of the century until the 'twenties.6 Joyce was probably familiar also with Lady Betty and May Oblong (Mrs. Roberts); is is astonishing that he failed to use the latter's name.

Yet the deeper problem of Circe was to relate Bloom and Stephen on the unconscious level, to justify the father-son theme that Joyce had made central in his book. He does so chiefly in terms of one trait which the two men share, their essentially in- active roles. Joyce is quite earnest about this. He has shown Bloom throughout as the decent man who, in his pacific way, combats narrowmindedness, the product of fear and cruelty, which Stephen had combatted in the Portrait with more truculence and still combats. Once we realize that Joyce sympathizes with Bloom and Stephen in their resistance in terms of mind rather than body, we can understand an aspect of the library episode which has puzzled commentators. Stephen Dedalus asserts there that Shakes- peare was not Hamlet but Hamlet's father. Since Stephen in so many ways resembles Hamlet, and since he obviously thinks of himself as like Shakespeare, this identification may seem capri- cious. But we have to understand Joyce's notion both of the artistic temperament and of the desirable man. Joyce, Stephen,

5. This young woman's father had a political job as scrivener in the Education Board. A priest came to see him to ask that he do something about his daughter; but Mr. Crawford twirled his villainous moustachcs and replied, "Well, the girl appears to be enjoying herself, and besides, she's a source of income to me."

6. Becky Cooper was noted for the prodigality of her charity as well as for her favors; young men who took her fancy were the surprised and sometimes embarrassed recipients of gifts of money and new clothes. A familiar song about her celebrated not her generosity, however, but her accessibility:

Italy's maids are fair to see And France's maids are willing But less expensive 'tis to me: Becky's for a shilling.

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and Bloom share the same philosophy of passivity in act, energy in thought, and tenacity in conviction. Hamlet, on the other hand, is the hero of a revenge-play; however unwittingly and fumblingly, he sheds a great deal of blood. Joyce does not en- courage this view of the artist, and so he relates Shakespeare to the suffering father, the victim, rather than to the avenging son. The artist endures evil-he doesn't inflict it. "I detest action," says Stephen to the soldiers. Because he takes this position, he belongs, in an extended metaphor which underlies all Ulysses, to the family of Bloom, who tells the Citizen, "It's no use.... Force, hatred, history, all that. That's not life for men and women, insult and hatred." They are son and father mentally, if not corporeally, and both of them argue that what is corporeal is incidental.7

The kinship of Stephen and Bloom, on the surface so un- likely, is established with great adroitness. Joyce makes use of two sources to aid him, both literary; the first is Leopold von Sacher- Masoch, the second William Blake. In the worst light Bloom's passivity in the face of Boylan's advances to Molly, and his re- jection of force in the Cyclops episode, seem part of a willing submission comparable to that of Sacher-Masoch. In the best light it is Blake's rejection of the corporeal, suggested by Stephen's comment, which stirs the soldiers to fury, "But in here [tapping his brow] it is I must kill the priest and the king."

While writing the Circe episode Joyce drew heavily upon Sacher-Masoch's book, Venus in Furs (Venus im Pelz). Much of the material about flagellation is derived principally from this book. Venus in Furs tells of a young man named Severin who so abases himself before his mistress, a wealthy lady named

7. In Finnegans Wake Shem also belongs to this type: "He went without saying that the cull disliked anything anyway approaching a plain straightforward standup or knockdown row and, as often as he was called in to umpire any octagonal argument among slangwhangers, the accomplished washout always used to rub shoulders with the last spcaker . . . and agree to every word as soon as half uttered.e... Here Joyce parodies Bloom and Stephen.

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Wanda, and so encourages her cruelty towards him, that she becomes increasingly tyrannical, makes him a servile go-between, and then, in a rapturous finale, turns him over to her most recent lover for a whipping. There are many similarities to Circe. The society ladies who appear to Bloom, Mrs. Yelverton Barry (a name modified from that of a suspected transvestist) and Mrs. Bellingham (an actual name) are as fond of wearing furs as Wanda. Mrs. Bellingham recounts accusingly of Bloom, "He addressed me in several lhandwritings with fulsome compliments as a Venus in furs and alleged profound pity for my frostbound coachman Balmer while in the same breath he expressed himself as envious of his earflaps and fleecy sheepskins and of his for- tunate proximity to my person, when standing behind my chair wearing my livery and the armorial bearings of the Bellingham escutcheon garnished sable, a buck's head couped or." This pic- ture of Bloom comes, at some remove, from that of the "hero" of Venus in Furs, who wears his lady's livery, has to follow her at ten paces, and suffers indignities comparable to those of Balmer.

Like Severin too, Bloom is depicted as welcoming his being birched, as even requesting this privilege. Wanda, reluctant at first to yield to her lover's strange importunities, is gradually cor- rupted by them: "You have corrupted my imagination and in- flamed my blood," she tells him; "Dangerous potentialities were slumbering in me, but you were the first to awaken them." Mrs. Mervyn Talboys puts it more ludicrously in Ulysses, "You have lashed the dormant tigress in my nature into fury." Severin asks to be allowed to put on his mistress's shoes, and is kicked for performing the task too slowly. Bloom is similarly set to lacing the shoes of Bella Cohen, and fears she will kick him for his ineptness. The more fearful and hateful Bella is, the more Bloom admires her; so Bella, like Wanda, puts her foot on Bloom's neck. The willing slavery of Severin to Wanda, which is sealed by an agreement she makes him sign, is echoed in Bloom's promise

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never to disobey Bella, and in her announcement to him, "What you longedl for lhas come to pass. Henceforth you are unmanned and mine in earnest, a thing under the yoke."

The degradatioln of Bloom continues. Like Severin, he is forced to usher in Bella's new lover, Blazes Boylan. A scene in Venus in Furs, in wlich Sevcrin attends Wanda at her bath, is reflected in an equivalent scene in Ulysses. And the climax of Sacher-Masoch's book, when Wan(da, pretending affection, coyly persuades Severin to let hier bin(d him against a pillar, and then turns him over to hier new lover for a merciless flogging, is echoed in Bella's pretense of affection wlich facilitates her pull- ing Bloom's hair. Even the references to the marble statuette that Bloom takes home in the rain, and to the nymph, "beautiful immortal," whose "classic curves" are pictured above his bed, are paralleled in the "stonecold and pure" plaster cast of Venus to which Severin prays in Venus in Furs.

Closely as he followed his source, Joyce made two major modifications. First, his version of Sacher-Masoclh is a vaudeville version; and second, Bloom's masochistic fantasies occur in his unconscious mind; he berates himself, and makes himself worse than he is, because he is consciouis of having allowed too much in reality. Masochism is the worst in Bloom, an(d Stephen too, but Blakism is the best. There are several references to Blake in the Circe episode, the most important at its end. There Stephen falls out with two soldiers, wlho accuse him of attacking the king because of his declaration, "But in here it is I must kill the priest and the king." Joyce has in mind here an incident that occurred during Blake's stay at Felpham, when he put two soldiers out of his garden in spite of their protests that as soldiers of the king they should not be handled so. He replied to them, or was alleged to have replied, "Damn the king," was therefore haled up for treason, an(d barely got off. (In Finnegans Wake the two soldiers become three, and lhave an equally unpleasant role to play.) Stephen does not put the soldliers to fliglht; rather they

374 ULYSSES

knock him down, but not before he has stated his contention that the authorities, religious and secular, must be defeated in spiritual rather than corporeal warfare. This is Blake's central conception of the conquest of tyranny by imagination.

Having displayed the body's defeat and the spirit's victory in both their ridiculous and noble aspects, Joyce brings about the mental purgation of Bloom and Stephen at the end of the episode. They are purged in a surprising way, for so reserved a book, that is, by love. The theme of family love, the love of a parent for child and of child for parents, runs throughout Ulysses, but so covertly that we are only subtly aware of it. Molly Bloom's thoughts return to the lambswool sweater she knitted for her son Rudy, who died when he was only eleven years old. The hyperborean Stephen, who claims to have denied his family, almost melts with affection when he comes upon his sister read- ing Chardenal's French primer, and remorse over his treatment of his mother accounts for his vision of her at the end of Circe. But Bloom emerges even more decisively from the Circean sty with his vision of Rudy as he might be now:

Against the dark wall a figure appears slowly, a fairy boy of eleven, a changeling, kidnapped, dressed in an Eton suit with glass shoes and a little bronze helmet, holding a book in his hand. He reads from right to left inaudibly, smiling, kissing the page.

BLOOM (Wonderstruck, calls inaudibly.) Rudy!

RUDY (Gazes unseeing into Bloom's eyes and goes on reading, kissing,

smiling. He has a delicate mauve face. On his suit he has diamond and ruby buttons. In his free left hand he holds a slim ivory cane with a violet bowknot. A white lambkin peeps out of his waistcoat pocket.)

This vision has been described as maudlin, but to see it only so is to yield to the erroneous presumption that tenderness is contrary to Joyce's temperament. It is the vision of a fond father,

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colored as such visions should be; and the sentimental coloring is offset by the bizarre attire and the detachment of the child both of which establish a sense of distance and estrangement from Bloom. The relation of Bloom and Rudy, as of Molly and Rudy, is profoundly moving; and so is the relation of Bloom to his own father, who committed suicide by taking aconite poison.8 (It is not surprising to learn that Joyce was broken up over his father's death, or that he used to say, as one of his sisters recalls, "The most important thing that can happen to a man is the birth of a child.") Joyce deliberately says nothing about its emo- tional quality, but he has Bloom at one point recall a few snatches from the letter found at his father's bedside. They make up what must be the best incomplete letter in literature: "To my dear son Leopold. Tomorrow will be a week that I received . . . it is no use Leopold to be ... with your dear mother ... That is not more to stand . . . to her . . . all for me is out . . . be kind to Athos, Leopold . . . my dear son . . . always . . . of me . . . das Herz ... Gott ... dein. . . ." These telling phrases sound the book's most powerful motif.

The phrase, "Be kind to Athos," refers to Bloom's father's dog-and kindness to animals, who are so much like children, and can repay affection only with returned affection, is another of those ordinary and fairly pervasive aspects of human nature that Joyce underlines for praise. Even the Citizen, like Homer's Cyclops, is good to animals. The kindness of Bloom on June i6, 1904, begins with animals and ends with human beings. So he feeds his cat in the morning, then some seagulls, and in the Circe episode feeds two dogs. He remembers his dead son and dead father, he is also concerned about his living daughter, and he never forgets his wife for a moment. He contributes very gen- erously-beyond his means-to the fund for the children of his friend Dignam who has just died; and, when he begins to see

8. His death is made to take place at the Queen's Hotel in Ennis because Joycc rc- membered a suicide that occurred there early in the century.

376 ULYSSES

Stephen as a sort of son, lhe follows him, tries to stop his drink- ing, )revents his being robbed, risks arrest to defend him from the police, and feeds him and takes him home. Steplhen will not stay the niglht with Bloom-the barrier between man and man breaks down only occasionally and usually only partially, and the barrier quickly reforms-but in the temporary uniting of the two Joyce affirms the perception of community wlhiclh Gabriel Conroy hladi at the end of "the Dead," and wlhiclh Stephen acknowledged when, at thie end of the Portrait, he went forth to forge a conscience "for his race."

Another aspect of Joyce's point of view is illuminated by the relation of Bloom andl Stephen: Bloom's common sense joins Steplhen's intelligence; Steplhen Dedalus, the Greek-Christian- Irishman, joins Bloom Ulysses, the Greek-Jewish-Irishman; the cultures seem to unite in praise of brainpower an(I decenicy as against horsepower and brutality. Neither Stephen nor Bloom is plhysically strong; they are contrasted tlhroughout the book with those wlho are: Stephen can't swim while Mulligan swims beau- tifully; Bloom is only a walker, but the Citizen is the holder of the shot-put recor(l for all Ireland; an(d Bloom is a cuckold while Blazes Boylan is the loud-mouthed adulterer; but we spend most of the book inside Bloom's consciousness, and never enter Boy- lan's, presumably because Joyce would not grant a consciousness to coarseness. It is true that Mulligan is clever as well as strong, but it is the cleverness that gdes with brutality. So we have Stephen and Bloom, the mental men, ranged against Mulligan and Boylan, the burly men, andl Joyce's partisanship is clear.

The scheme of value of Ulysses comes closer to explicit ex- pression in the Circe episode than it does anywlhere else. It is buttresse(d by a passage from another sectioni whlich has been ignore(l. Wlhen Bloom and Stephen are walking home to 7 Ecclcs Street from the cabrman's shelter, they discuss a great many things, an(d Joyce notes, witlh some un(lerstatement, that their views were on certaini points (livergent. "Stephen," hie writes,

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"dissented openly from Bloom's view on the importance of dietary and civic selfhelp while Bloom dissented tacitly from Stephen's views on the eternal affirmation of the spirit of man in literature." While the loftiness of Stephen's statement is mocked, that literature embodies thie eternal affirmation of the spirit of man is not a crotclhet of Stephen, but a principle of Joyce. He first stated it in his lecture on Mangan in I902, when he declared that "all those wlho have written nobly have not written in vain," and said that they had part "in the continual affirmation of the spirit." In the light of these pronouncements on the func- tion of literature, the assertion of love and community in the Circe episode can be better understoocl; and it nee(i be no wonder that the whole of Ulysses should end with a mighty "yes."

IV. The Hero, the Herointe, the Villain, and the Day In niaking lhis lhero Leopo!d Bloom Joyce recognized implicitly wlhat he often sl)oke of (lirectly, his affinity for the Jews as a wandering, persecute(l people. When a Jewish student wrote to him to praise Ulysses but complain of its treatment of the Jews, Joyce was much upset and replied that he was in complete sympathy with them. No doubt the incongruity of making his goo(d Dubliner a Jew, and one so indifferent to all religious forms as to have been converted to botlh Protestantism and Catholicism, attracted him with its satirical possibilities. But he must have been affected also by the Dreyfus uproar in Paris, which con- tinued from 1892 to I9o6; it had reached one of its crises in Sep- tember, I902, just before Joyce's arrival in Paris, when Anatole France, a favorite author of Joyce, delivered his eloquent oration over Zola, anothier favorite, whose J'accuse was still reverberating over Europe. A connection between the Jew and his artist- defen(ler may have becn fixed in Joyce's mind by the connection between Zola, France, andi Dreyfus.

Joyce was not, however, a propagandist for better treatment of the oppressed races. The parable of the likable Jew attracted

378 ULYSSES

without overwhelming him. He was of course aware that the Jews of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Dickens had been conceived as villains. But he boldly formed the idea of reversing the tech- nique of Shakespeare, who had endowed even Shylock with a few redeeming traits. He decided to make Bloom likable and even noble in a humdrum sort of way, but to save him from sentimentality, or proselytizing, by making him also somewhat absurd as a convert, a drifter, a cuckold.

We have observed the similarity in many of the recollections of Bloom and Joyce, but have yet to recognize their internal likeness. Joyce was not a cuckold, but for a time he incorrectly, and in great agitation, thought of himself as one. This pivotal experience occurred during his visit to Dublin in I909. He de- cided to call upon his old friend Vincent Cosgrave, an arrogant wastrel. Cosgrave stupefied him by claiming to have betrayed Joyce with Nora in 1904. This news was so painful and discon- certing to Joyce, whose share of unconventionality was much smaller than is usually supposed, that he went immediately to his friend J. F. Byrne (Cranly) for counsel and support.

Byrne was then living at the address which accordingly became so important in Ulysses, 7 Eccles Street. He was able to quiet Joyce after a time by pointing out the unreliability of Cos- grave, which later was established irrefutably, even for Joyce's Jesuitical mind, by Stanislaus Joyce, who had happened to meet Cosgrave on the very night wlhen Nora rebuffed him. Joyce gradually became calmer and sometime after went out to buy Nora a necklace on which was written, "Love is unhappy when love is away." The incident had nevertheless deeply affected him, and became the central theme in both Ulysses and Exiles. And so, when Bloom at 7 Eccles Street gradually recovers his calm about Molly's affair with Boylan, Joyce is half-mocking, half- paralleling his own agony and recovery during the summer of igog. For Cosgrave he reserved an artist's revenge, by calling him by the unpleasant name of Lynch, and by having Stephen

RICHARD ELLMANN 379

say, after Lynch abandons him in his trouble with the soldiers in Circe, "Exit Judas."

But Bloom is more tlhan- Joyce. He resembles in some ways Joyce's good friend in Trieste, the businessman and writer Ettore Schmitz ((Italo Svevo). The difference in age between Svevo and Joyce was roughly the same as that between Bloom and Stephen, and Stanislaus Joyce calls attention to a resemblance in the relationships. Besides, Svevo also had married a Gentile, had changed his name (though only for literary purposes), possessed a good sense of humor and a fair knowledge of Jewish customs. Where Joyce was partial only to cats, Svevo, like Bloom, had a fondness for dogs as well. Wheie Joyce could not abide the inner organs of animals and fowl, Svevo, like Bloom, loved them. These are small similarities, but Joyce had a spider's eye.

Otlher Dubliners helped him to roun(d out his portrait of his hero. The first was a "Mr. Hunter," as Joyce calls him in a letter to Stanislaus about the story which he intended to name, "Ulysses." Joyce had met him only twice, but he wrote to his aunt Josepline Murray to obtain all the details about him that she could. Hunter, tall and dark-faced, was supposed to be Jewish in spite of his name, which he had presumably changed, and was rumored to have an unfaithful wife. But in making Bloom an advertisement canvasser Joyce had someone else in mind. This man is first mentioned in Dubliners under the name of C. P. M'Coy, and is identified there as having been a clerk in the Midland Railway, a canvasser for advertisements for the Irish Times and Freeman's Journal, a town traveller for a coal firm on commission, a private inquiry agent, a clerk in the office of the sub-Sheriff, and secretary to the City Coroner. His wife had been a soprano and still taught young children to play the piano at low terms. These facts all point to M'Coy's actual pro- totype, Charley Chance, whose wife sang at concerts in the 'nineties under the name of Madame Marie Tallon. In the variety of his jobs, in the name and profession of his wife, Chance was

380 ULYSSES

the only Dubliner who fitted the description of Bloom; and that Joyce intended to combine him with Hunter is suggested by the juxtaposition of "Charley Chance" witlh "Mr. Hunker" in Fin- negans Wake.

The name of Madame Marie Tallon bears a sisterly re- semblance to Madame Marion Tweedy, Mrs. Bloom's concert name. In using the Clhances Joyce neatly concealed their identity, however; he prevented anyone's supposing that they were in any sense the Blooms by ilntroducing the M'Coys as well into his book, and by inventing a professional rivalry between Mrs. M'Coy and Mrs. Bloom. The character which he attributes to Mrs. Bloom is also unlikc that of Mrs. Chance, whom he prob- ably did not know; it is rather that of the buxom wife of a fruit store owner named Santos, with whom he was acquainted in Trieste and in Zurich. That Mrs. Santos had a good share in Mrs. Bloom was an open secret in the Joyce family. (During the sec- ond war Joyce was greatly concerned over the fate of Santos and his wife, then living in Marseilles, and was relieved to hear from Mrs. Maria Jolas, wlho at his request inquired about them there, that they had not been molested.) For the Spanish quality in Mrs. Bloom he drew upon one of the many daughters of Matt Dillon, an old friend of the family who is mentioned in Ulysses too. This daughter lhad been in Spain, smoked cigar- ettes, and was considered a Spanish type. Her image was perhaps the dominant inspirationi for Joyce's picture of Molly as a girl at Gibraltar; Mrs. San-tos in figure and conduct modelled the mature Molly, while her professional career and social status were drawn from Mrs. Chance.

"Leopold Bloom" was also named with due deliberation. Leopold was the first narmie of a Jewish businessman in Trieste with wlhom Joyce was friendly; Bloom was the name of two or three families who lived in Dublin contemporaneously with Joyce. From one of these, a Mr. J. Bloom, Joyce borrowed the address of 38 Lombard Street, which was one of the longer

RICHARD ELLMANN 38 1

stopping-places of the Bloom family. Joyce was relieved to hear from A. J. Leventhal of Trinity College, Dublin, just before Ulysses appeared, that all these Blooms had died or left Ireland. He probably remembered the name in two specific connections: first, a man named Bloom was committed in Wexford for the murder of a girl who worked with him in a photographic shop. He was let off and left the country. This incident, which occurred early in the century, presumably gave Joyce the plan of establish- ing Bloom's daughter Milly as an apprentice in a photographer's shop. He put the shop in Mullingar because he had visited there during the summers of I899 and I900 and remembered the one such shop in the town, run by a man named Phil Shaw. The second connection of the name Bloom was Daisy Bloom, a young woman who in 10og was a music teacher in Dublin, and had been converted to Catholicism. It is very possible that Joyce heard about her and drew a hint from her for Molly.

Molly's father is represented as Major Brian Cooper Tweedy; Brian Cooper was a famous Irish officer of the time, while Tweedy is modeled syllabically and accentually upon Major Powell, who lived at 12 Stamer Street and was well known to Mrs. Murray, Joyce's aunt. As witlh Hunter, she filled out a note- book with what she recalled of Powell's peculiarities to help Joyce in his book. No information about Powell now survives except that he had three daughters, one a Mrs. Clinch, whose name also appears in Ulysses; the name of Powell is given to Josie Powell Breen, once a sweetheart of Bloom, now married to a litigious crackpot wlhose libel suit over nothing is a parody of Joyce's own libel suit in Zurich against Carr.

If Molly is built mainly out of Mrs. Chance, Mrs. Santos, and Dillon's dauglhter, she hlas also a few temperamental links with Joyce's wife. Nora Joyce lha(d a similar gift for pungent, concentrated expression, and Joyce delighted in it as much as Bloom did. When her husband made one of his innumerable requests of friends that they do some small service for him, Nora

382 ULYSSES

would say, "If God Almighty came down to earth, you'd have a job for him." When Joyce showed off a letter he had just received from C. G. Jung, in which the psychologist marvelled at the knowle(dge of women displayed in the final chapter of Ulysses, her comment was, "He knows nothing at all about women." She (lismissed the Molly Bloom monologue as contemptuously as Molly herself dismissed Moll Flanders. On the other hand, when someone, after her husband's death, asked if she remem- bered hiis meetings witlh Andre' Gide, she replied after a mo- ment's unsuccessful effort to recollect, "Sure if you've been married to the greatest writer in the world you don't remember all the little fellows." Like Molly she was anti-intellectual; and like Molly she was very attached to her hiusband but not awe- struck.

The rarity of capital letters and the run-on sentences in Molly's monologue are of course related to Joyce's theory of her mind (and of the female mind in general) as a flow, in contrast to the series of short jumps made by Bloom and Stephen. But these characteristics were probably suggested to him by the fact that Nora, after leaving Dublin with him, frequently began letters to her family but (lid not finish them; on one occasion Joyce, looking over her slhoulder, remarked, "Well, if you're going to write to them, at least start with a capital letter," to which she replied, "What difference does it make?" Another tenuous resemblance is that the name of an early suitor of Nora in Galway is given to Molly's Gibraltar friend, Lieutenant Mul- vey. The rigors of walking out in the Galway rain are trans- formed into the pleasures of Gibraltar promenades, and the innocent episo(le given a more serious turn.

Whoever her prototypes were, it is necessary to correct cer- tain misinterpretations of Molly. The celebrated monologue does not deserve its reputation of being the stummit of promiscuity, nor does it fit the description of it, by a writer like Frank O'Connor, as the summit of cruel, unfair, and anti-feminine dis-

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section. If Molly were really promiscuous in her conduct, Joyce would not have used her for heroine, for that sort of flamboy- ance belongs to melodrama, not usually to everyday. It is true that Mr. Bloom, and critics after him, lists no less than twenty- five lovers of Molly. But when we look at the list it contains some extraordinary names: there are two priests, a lord mayor, an alderman, a gynecologist, a bootblack, a professor. In the book it is clear that she has confessed to the priests, consulted with the gynecologist, and coquetted with the rest. But only the most Jesuitical interpretation of infidelity-a burlesque of Richard Rowan's Jesuitical interpretation in Exiles-could classify these episodes under that heading.

The two lovers Molly has had since her marriage are Bartell D'Arcy and Boylan. While adultery is not excused by its in- frequence, a tolerant age may find her behavior not wholly unjustified in view of the fact that for eleven years, since she was twenty-two, her husband has not had sexual relations with her. Most of her internal monologue is devoted to her reminiscences of love-making before her marriage, but even these are on exam- ination less glamorous, and much less numerous, than usually recognized. The impression of voluptuousness remains, but is based more on her longings or potentialities than on her activi- ties. Joyce delights in heightening her into someone beyond her- self, and then in pulling her back to 7 Eccles Street. She has to be an ordinary woman, an ordinary wife, not an adulteress on the grand scale.

There is no reason to limit her to being an earth goddess either. Her fecundity is not in the least remarkable. She has had two children, a boy and a girl, but the boy died shortly after birth-hardly an impressive record for a goddess of fertility. But it may be objected that if she has not engendered everything, at least she accepts everything. Actually she does not. She is dis- satisfied with the coarseness of Blazes Boylan, and beyond that, seems dissatisfied with the consummation of physical love and

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finds the male body rather unpleasant. She remains beyond every- thing else a wife more than a goddess; married to Bloom, she will remain married, even if dissatisficd with him too. For Molly also acknowledges, though with considerable reluctance and appro- priate feminine indirection, the importance of mind as opposed to body, the importance of decency, and the bonds of the family. The virile Boylan is nothing but a body, while the much less virile Bloom is, with all his shortcomings, body and mind.

In choosing a prototype for his adulterer Joyce evolved a person opposite to Bloom in every way-inl plhysical strength, manner of dress and speech, conduct of life. Joyce does not fur- nish muclh help towards the (letcction of Boylan's prototype. He informs us, however, that Boylan's fatlher was a horse dealer off Island Bridge who sold hiorses to the British during the Boer War, that Boylan is a flashy dresser, especially notable for his straw hat, and that he has just managed a prizefighter. These details are, as we miglht expect from the confusing use made of Charley Chance as botlh M'Coy anid (in part at least) Bloom, a mixture. The horse dealer who had his premises off Island Bridge was James Daly, who does not fit in with the other details except that, like all other horse dealers in Dublin, he sold horses to the British during the Boer War. There was, however, a horse dealer during the 'nineties who actually bore the name Boylan, and probably had Blazes or Blazer for a nickname. Joyce took his name, and probably borrowed the occupation and appearance of the character from someone else, a man named Ted Keogh, who is still alive. Keogh runs a junk shop under Merchant's Arch in almost exactly the same location as the hawker's car where Bloom buys The Sweets of Sin for Molly. Keogh did not know Joyce personally; his only connection with the family, he relates, was that as a boy he shot a peashooter at Jack Joyce's top hat and hit it. Keogh in I909 was, like his father, a horse dealer; he dressed expensively, and habitually wore a straw hat; and when Joyce visited Dublin in that year Keogh was managing a well known

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prize fighter. Keogh was niot, however, the kind of person that Boylan was in most other respects, and Joyce imposed new traits of character upon him. Some of these may have come from a Triestine friend whose first name, Robert, is given to the an- tagonist of Richard Rowan in Exiles.9

Boylan's first name is not Blazes, as he is always called, but Hugh; and the provenance of this name is amusing. It is likely that Joyce had in mind his classmate at University College, Dub. lin-Hugh Boyle Kennedy-a prim and proper man even as an undergraduate, who not only disapproved of Joyce's morals but had the impertinence to oppose his paper on "Drama and Art" with public objections. Kennedy was later to become Chief Jus- tice of the High Court, and Joyce must have keenly enjoyed his private joke.

Blazes Boylan's name has another remarkable attribute; it is the privilege, given to only one other character in Joyce's work -Gabriel Conroy-of sharing the vowel sounds as well as the alliteration of the name "James Joyce." (Richard Rowan in Exiles has only the alliteration.) While with any other writer we might find here merely a coincidence, Joyce's passionate in- terest in names suggests a further significance. The relation of Boylan to Bloom may well be what Kenneth Burke calls "nega- tive synecdoche," as the villain is the negative representation of the hero. Joyce's notes for Exiles show that he regarded the rela- tion of hero and villain as a strange compound of admiration and repugnance. The mindless swagger of Boylan has an air about it. While Joyce's clear preference is for the mental men, the Shems, he may have had a sneaking regard for those burly men, the Shawns, with whom Boylan belongs.

There remains the final question of why June i6, I904, was chosen for the date of Ulysses. Joyce's attachment to anniversaries is too well known to admit of the possibility that the choice was

9. The last nanme, Hand, Nvas probahly borrowe(d from an unpleasant personage in Blake's works.

386 ULYSSES

accidental. Mrs. Joyce used to say that it was the day when she and her husband first met, but Gorman dates this event a week earlier, apparently basing his statement on Joyce's report. It seems more likely that it was on this day that James Joyce and Nora Barnacle went for a promenade on Howth, that on the way they stopped at Downes's cakeshop to buy one of Joyce's favorite sweets, a seed-cake, and that they climbed the Hill of Howth, which is completely covered at that season with rhodo- dendrons, embraced and spoke of their love. Bloom's fondest memory is of just such a moment, and Mrs. Bloom's is too; it is with her recollection of it that the book ends. In this sense Ulysses is an epithalamion; love is its cause of motion. The spirit is lib- erated from its bonds through a eucharistic occasion, an occasion characterized by what Joyce demanded of literature, a "profane joy." That such occasions are as rare as miracles does not reduce their value, but enhances it. They require no divine intercession; they arise in quintessential purity from the mottled life of everyday.

To trace the materials of Ulysses is to discover a fuller ad- miration for the hand that changed them or, with equal mastery, let them alone. That Joyce should have moved on to Finnegans Wake may appear less surprising in view of this shaping of the earlier book. For the superimposition of one character upon another, the welding of the living and dead, seem a prophecy of the cyclical theory that the living are the dead, and of the linguistic theory that the languages may be welded into a com- posite too. All humanity began to fall into types in Joyce's mind, all history into recurrences of a few situations. Words move into words, people into people, incidents into incidents like the am- biguities of a pun. The perception of resemblance must have been an exaltation, for it meant that human decency would persist through the never ending cycles, and the affirmable spirit of man be indeed, as he had dared to say in his faithless youth, eternal.